Product Reviews

You can buy a mono laser printer for well under £100, but it would be a basic device designed for printing from a single PC. If you want more, you'll have to spend a little more. Dell's matter-of-factly named 1720dn Duplex Network Laser Printer costs £210, but has several features you wouldn't find on a budget model. As well as a USB port, it has an Ethernet port, allowing you to connect it directly to a wired network (or a wired port on a wireless router) and share it between users. It also offers a built-in duplexer to print automatically on both sides of the paper.

Dell has made the 1720dn as straightforward as possible to install. A large and clear quick setup sheet guides you through opening the front compartment to remove packaging from the consumables. On a typical home network,

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the 1720dn will automatically receive the IP address it needs to work, and produce a configuration sheet that confirms it, which could be very useful for troubleshooting. Dell's install software didn't need any help to detect the printer on our network.

Basic laser printers rely on your PC to send a complete image of the page, but the 1720dn supports the two leading print languages, PCL and PostScript. Using these, the PC can send more basic instructions, leaving the printer to work out the details, which can speed things up. The installer lets you choose whether to install drivers for these, but on the relevant page you can't easily tell which is which.

We tested the printer using both drivers. Text printing was impressively quick, and produced black, crisp characters on the page. The PCL driver produced very good graphics, with accurate shading that helped to make the most of photo subjects, but the PostScript driver was slower and produced inferior results with excessive contrast.

The 1720dn's running costs are about two-thirds of what we'd expect for an entry-level printer, so it's quite affordable to run. Using its duplexer could halve your paper use and save you even more money, but you'd need to print many thousands of pages before the savings would offset the printer's higher price. Even so, its features, quality and speed help make it worth the extra money.