- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 18 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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3 out of 3 people found this review helpful
3.5 stars
"Best value (deal but not a steal) in an all-in-one for home office."
Pros: Fast B&W prints; Great price; Rich Feature-set; Sturdy construction
Cons: Print quality only o.k.; poor support; some firmware bugs; misleading promise of networkability
Summary: This is a good quality multifunction at a very good price. It offer a rich feature set that should meet the printing and faxing needs of any home office and small business with less than 3 employees. The construction is sturdy feeling, though I would not recommend heavy office use.
Print quality is only OK. I had a very inexpensive Epson C60 that printed much sharper images both in B&W and color. The 962's images are still passable none the less. Prints, especially B&W, are very fast and relatively quite.
The are a few firmware bugs. One particular inconvenience is that the collate feature will not lock in as a default setting for the copy function (it does so for printing from the computer). The machine gives you the option to set collate as a default for copying, and even looks as if it has done it. But alas, everytime you copy, you have to manually scroll through the menus and select collate if so desired. This is a minor issue . However, it did expose me to Dell support's ineptitude w/ this machine. Their defualt answer for anything is to reference the user's manaul (which is vague and rather incomplete to begin with). If you need help beyond what's in the user's guide, you are better off surfing the web for user group postings than calling Dell.
A major consideration in the decision to purchase this machine is it option to connect to a wireless network via a seperately pruchased network adaptor ($99 direct from Dell). This gives the impression that for under $300, you could have a networkable mutilfunction. This is not really true. The network adapter is incredibly difficult to configure, with (again) practically no help available from Dell support. One also must realize that this network adapter simply allows the machine to be accessed over a small, serverless LAN. It DOES NOT incorporate a print server. This means that Dell drivers and software for this machine must be installed on every machine accessing it. Even then, acces in not bi-directional; meaning you can not access the 962s other functions (scan & fax) from any other computer not directly connected via a USB cable. If you want to add this or any other mustilfunction with a built-in print server to a network, you're going to have to invest in a USB devise server.
Finally, you can only purchase ink catridges directly from Dell. Not cheap at around $30 per.
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