Dell 3130cn Toner Cartridges

Dell 3130cn Printer Review

The Dell 3130cn color laser printer is designed for the small or medium office environment, or a home user who needs fast color printing capabilities. Its print speed and quality are both excellent and outshine competing models such as the HP 3550 toner printer. However, the 3130cn's bulky frame might make a tight fit for small offices.

The Dell 3130cn color laser printer has built-in ethernet networking, allowing it to be connected and shared across a network of computers easily. It has a solid paper capacity of 400 sheets, and can be expanded to a maximum of 950 sheets with the addition of a 500-sheet paper drawer. Its onboard memory of 128MB can be expanded to a maximum of 1,280 MB, allowing it to handle larger or more complex documents if needed.

With its built-in ColorTrack software, it is possible to set up as many as 50 different accounts, which can set limits on color printing or disable it entirely for some users. It also tracks printing for each account specifically. The ColorTrack software can also be accessed remotely with the Web Configuration Tool. With this tool, users can manage virtually any aspect of the unit from a web browser.

Dell 3130cn toner cartridges are more expensive than many competing models, such as HP P1005 toner, giving it a higher cost of ownership, despite its lower upfront price. The single black printer toner cartridge has a capacity of 4,000 pages, while each color laser toner cartridge has a capacity of 3,000 pages.

Print quality is excellent. Color graphics and photos are very sharp and vibrant, approaching the quality of a dedicated photo printer. Print speed is very fast for the price, at up to 31 pages per minute in monochrome, and 26 pages per minute in color.

Overall, the Dell 3130cn is certainly an upgrade from the slightly less efficient Dell 3110cn toner printer. However, the low upfront cost of the 3130cn is unfortunately outweighed by its higher toner costs, which make it a very expensive color printing solution.