Dell Color Laser Printer 5100cn user reviews

Pros Great speed and print quality if you need less than 40 or so pages per run.

Cons Runs over 40 or so pages can take so long that it undoes any claims of fast printing as it can take well over an hour or more to print just 175 pages. Can't print photos on Dell's own glossy stock!

Summary This is an O.K. printer overall but the design flaws keeps it from being a great printer.You can't use photo paper either. I bought a ton of Dell’s own photo quality paper just to ensure compatibility only to yield 100% bad prints. The ink actually gummed up all over the glossy paper and must have left material on the drum because the next run of standard doc files had random patterns of ink all over them. As a product developer I detect that this was an OEM printer out of China private labeled for Dell and little attention was paid to quality. In other words I think this was Dell's shortcut to get into the high volume Laser Printer market without any development costs.

If you already have this printer you can work around the goofy "calibration routine" bug by segmenting your print run in 40 page groups.Otherwise you can expect two groups of 40 or so pages each followed by dozens of groups of two to three pages each. It's as if the printer starts running out of gas!

Dell makes decent computers but this printer is a thousand dollar boat anchor.

Pros After going through HP's for big $$$ with slow results. I took a shot at the Dell where you can buy it refurbished from Dell with full factory warranty for $550. My first printing was super fast!!!

Cons Can only pick up heavy stock from aux 250 sheet feeder. But so does everyone elses under $5,000.

Summary What a stone cold beast. I print 2,000-5,000 color postcards a month. HP was killing me with consumables with 6 page per minute color. With my printing needs easily getting 20+ a minute. These are cheaper and last longer. Would have been a perfect 10 if it could handle heavy stock in the 1,000 sheet bin. For $550, you have a problem if you dont buy this printer. Its big though, MAKE WAY!!!

Pros Price is great, speed (when not calibrating) is good and networking makes it easy to set up.

Cons Constant calibrating is obviously not taken into account when figuring speed of color prints. About every 30 pages or so it'll take 30-60 seconds to calibrate - causing the actual speed to be SLOW

Summary Keep in mind that you'll only be able to get supplies for this printer from Dell - a fact that I wish I had considered. The colors are muddy and muted and it takes a lot of tweaking to get colors where they should be. Cost per print is high if doing large color areas. I switched from a Tektronix solid ink printer (the printer head went out and it was cheaper to buy this printer than a part for the Tektronix) and the color can't even come close to comparing. If you don't have any high quality/volume color printer to compare it to - you'll probably be happy - otherwise - I'd probably choose something else. It's a case of you get what you pay for. Take the total cost of ownership, and the only being able to get supplies from Dell into consideration before making this purchase.

Speed for graphic intensive work is about 1 page a minute for two sided printing! That's for a 13 MB .pdf file.

Pros Inexpensive, disposable

Cons Terrible print quality, slow, burns through consumables quickly

Summary DO NOT PURCHASE:

I am currently running 27 of these printers. We spent over $200,000.00 with Dell last year and were given several free printers. First of all, the prints are not sharp (but OK for office printing). The printer is slow to respond and takes over a minute to 'Calibrate' everytime you send a print job. Also, the print drivers have many quirks allowing for little customization and several irritating features. The printer does NOT print envelopes, which is crucial for many of our accountants ect. It wrinkles each envelope upon print- and when we spoke to tech support they said that this is normal and there is nothing we could do.

We had one extra printer (never opened and still brand new). We had had it on our shelf for just over 30 days and could not return it. VERY frusterating! Could it be worse? Yes. The printers are complaining that it needs the imaging drum replaced after just 25,000 pages. Our HP's will go over 100,000 on a drum. The dell drum is over $200.00 to replace and if since we print roughly 150,000 pages/year per printer, maintenance for these drums is $32,400.00 per year. This doesnt even include ink. Great. thanks dell.