Dell Laser Printer 5100cn review

The Dell 5100cn looks almost lightweight, but it's still large and hefty. It's the most inexpensive printer in the class with an automatic duplex unit fitted at standard and has the best black & white print speed rating. The 5100cn's ordinary 650-sheet paper tray can be upgraded to a massive 2,150 sheets paper tray.

The Dell 5100cn printer needs a little bit of setting up. Before you can start printng.First of all remove all the packing materials from the machine, toner cartridges and paper drawers and lower in the hefty photoconductor unit. The Dell 5100cn has individual drums for each colour, but these are constructed into a one individual consumable unit with a life cycle of up to 35,000 A4 pages.

Uncommonly for a Dell printer, the Dell 5100cn can handle operating systems other than Microsoft Windows. Its installation software made the install and setup easy and presented a choice of mono-only, colour and password-secured colour installs. We weren't able to detect the Dell 5100cn printer over our network and had to create a TCP/IP port for it manually.

Using the PCL driver, the Dell 5100cn created the fastest mono text in its class, out doing the Epson's AcuLaser C2600n and others in its class. We were much less impressed with the final results, although, which were not a solid black and made an appearance of angled lines. Making the Dell 5100cn printer to print only in black mono resolved the issue, doing this is manually is a needless procedure.

PCL illustrations or photos were also unsatisfactory, with colours that were not at suitable levels. PostScript results were far better but took more time. The dell 5100cn is one of the most effective duplex printers of its class, but we couldn't persuade it to print envelopes with the proper orientation and it messed up them horribly.

The Dell 5100cn has the option of using high cap toner cartridges which compatible cartidges are available. The Dell 5100 Compatible Toner Cartridges Specification Manufacturer Part No.: 593-10054, 593-10051, 593-10052, 593-10053 Colour: 4 Colour Multipack Duty Cycle: Approx. 9,000 black / 8,000 colour pages @ 5% average coverage making printing with the Dell 5100cn laser printer in colour and mono cost effective using Office One Print and Inks comptabile Laser Toner cartridges.