Dell 2330dn review

Dell made its name in the PC business, producing cheap, quality systems to order, but these days it's so much more than that. It now sells everything from monitors to projectors, and its laser printers aren't half bad either.

The 2330dn printer is hardly the picture of style with its boxy black chassis, but laser printers rarely are; it's by speed, quality, cost to run and features that they're judged. And on two of those counts this Dell is impressive. First, it matches our Labs Winner on value. After 10,000 pages you'll have paid out £269 exc VAT, and it maintains that thrifty performance the more pages you produce.

Second, it's jammed full of features: an LCD panel, duplex unit and network connectivity are all included for a ludicrous price of £141 exc VAT. And it isn't barebones elsewhere either, with a 50-sheet multipurpose input tray and 250-sheet input tray providing decent capacity, and the option to add a further 550-sheet tray for just £66 extra.

At such a low price we weren't surprised to find the Dell soon beginning to fall behind. Quality is poor: photos and graphics suffered from banding; text wasn't as crisp and clear as the best printers this month. And, in a race, it won't keep up with the award winners either. Despite a rating of 33ppm, the 2330dn produced mixed results. It printed our 50-page text test at 32ppm, but more complex documents slowed it considerably, with an overall average of 27ppm.

These two aspects shouldn't put you off the Dell - it's very good value for money, after all - but we'd recommend you spend a little more on the Kyocera, which is slightly faster and produces marginally better quality prints.

Author: Jonathan Bray