Dell 1130n Laser Printer: Not Very Cost-Effective

Dell has been manufacturing printers for quite some time now and just last month, they came out with the 1130n along with a barrage of other printers. The 1130n is a monochromatic, network ready printer, specifically targeted towards small and medium businesses.

The 1130n prints your office documents..

In simple language, the 1130n is supposed to suit the environment where you have a small office with a few computers connected on a network best. But let’s take a detailed look as to what this printer can offer.

Design and Features
The Dell 1130n has a conventional design and is not a lot bigger than the Brother HL-3070CW Color Printer. The plastic being used to build the 1130n is of good quality and feels pretty sturdy. I personally liked the matte finish throughout the 1130n. Also, there is no part that feels flimsy or out of place. Even the printer’s feeding tray that has a capacity of 250 pages, fits in properly.

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Good quality plastic and well designed

While fact is that you won’t be lugging a printer around everyday, the printer weighs in at 7.3 Kg and has dimensions of 360mm x 389mm x 197mm - neither too heavy nor too light. There are a couple of buttons on top for power and canceling a print command. The interface in the rear has a power inlet, an Ethernet port (that makes the 1130n network ready) and a USB port to connect to a single computer as well. All these ports are quite easy to reach and won’t cause any sort of hindrance whatsoever.

Ports are well spaced out

Setting up the printer for the network is easy. The drivers detect the network printer within seconds. Once that’s done, it’s possible to access the printer through a web interface. The features and performance settings are customizable. Users can play around with various settings for their page layout and quality of the printing. There are also options to alert either the system admin or the key user during different scenarios like empty paper tray or a paper jam and so on.

Overall, there aren’t any qualms in terms of design, build quality and the interface of the printer.
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Performance
The Dell 1130n claims to print at speeds of 24 pages per minute. While the tests we carried did not show the exact same results, it wasn’t too disappointing either. We carried these tests in standard printing mode and toner saving mode.

Will inform you via e-mail for an empty tray!

A normal text heavy page with toner (or eco-mode) on took approximately 8 seconds while with eco-mode off it took 5 seconds. Also 10 pages of mixed (pictures and text) PD documents took 22 seconds with Toner set to on. On the other hand with toner set to off, the same test took 25 seconds. Taking a rough approximate, the 1130n can dole out somewhere about 20-22 pages of black-and-white print in a minute which, as mentioned earlier, is not too bad.

Now that we’re done with the print speeds, let’s take one important factor when we look at a printout, its quality. The tests included a PDF document with text and images, another with multiple font sizes and the third with a high-resolution image.

An expensive one, this

While you can’t really rate the quality of a color printout from a monochromatic printer, you can always look at the amount of detail. In the image, while some very minute details were seen, they weren’t the best of replications. For e.g. the small pins in the processor were visible but when we took a closer look, the ink somewhat spilled to other columns as well. The test was run in the standard printing mode and selecting the best quality.

Coming to the different fonts printout, the difference between standard and toner-saving modes were quite visible. With the toner saving mode turned off, the printout looks a little dull when compared to turning eco-mode off. A closer look at the former document reveals that all the details in an alphabet like the curves in various alphabets were not completely covered with ink. However, with toner-saving mode turned on, the page looked quite decent.

Mixed PDF did not differ much between the two toner modes. The prime difference being that some ink was not very visible when it came to some fine print in the document.

To sum it all up, the quality of printouts are quite decent. Although, you might observe slight differences when it comes to the eco-mode, these differences are negligible to the naked eye.
Verdict

While the printing speed and quality are very decent, the 1130n is expensive at Rs. 16,000. A couple of other options include the Samsung ML-2571N that is priced at Rs. 12,500 MRP or an even cheaper Xerox-Phaser 3124 which will set you back by only Rs. 8,858 can do the job.