Performance
Compared with other printers within the same category and price range, the Dell V305w represents the best and worst of the pack. It prints black text at an impressive rate of 7.82 pages per minute (PPM), almost double the speed of the pricier Kodak ESP5. The Dell can also scan a full page of black-and-white graphics faster than the competitors, but we're disappointed by the time it takes to print color documents, specifically presentation and 4-inch-by-6-inch photos. The Photosmart C8180 is the slowest photo printer in the bunch at 0.66 PPM, but the Dell isn't much faster at 0.88 PPM, and the same story can be told for our color Powerpoint presentation test; the V305w's 1.24PPM benchmark puts it in dead last.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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B/W Scanning | |
Presentation Speed | |
Photo Speed | |
Black Text Speed |
The Dell V305w can use improvement in output quality as well. The driver gives you the option of printing in either 1,200 or 4,800 dpi resolution and will automatically choose the latter if you load photo paper into the feeder. However, even at 4,800 dpi, black-and-white text still looks blotchy and unevenly spread across the paper. In addition, decreasing text font to size 6 causes letters to bleed into one another with severely jagged lines and uneven edges. In our stock 4-inch-by-6-inch photo quality test, we noticed a dark hue overshadowing a majority of the picture resulting in muted tones and imbalanced color saturation throughout the page. Individual portrait shots suffer from the same problem; large individual pixels show up in places like light skin tones, where the color gradation is too subtle for the print head to handle.
Service and support
Dell covers the V305w with a standard one-year warranty, although specific information is difficult to find in the documentation and the Web site. Dell's support page offers FAQs, hot topics of conversation, in-depth popular topics, and 24-7 on-call technical support. There's also an option on the site to extend the standard warranty, but you're required to register for a service tag in order to get any information on pricing.
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