Dell 1700n

Combining good looks and small proportions, Dell's 1700n seeks to make mono laser printing an economical choice for the home. There's little arguing with the price either: £159 is an undeniably attractive sum for a networked printer.

The 1700n is certainly fast - our 50-page document printed at a rate of 25ppm after a processing time of 22 seconds. Our 24-page DTP document slowed things down slightly, although 17ppm is still a decent pace, and the processing time rose to 25 seconds. Even our taxing 12-page Excel document couldn't cripple the print speed - those who work with complex spreadsheets will find the 14.4ppm speed acceptable.

Processing times are a touch slow, rising to 33 seconds when printing a 25MB PDF file. Handling complex graphics slowed things down too, with a hi-res Photoshop colour photo montage taking 6 minutes, 23 seconds.

The review sample supplied to us was a pre-production model, and it's clear Dell has some improvements to make before we can comfortably recommend the 1700n, particularly to anyone who works with graphics or DTP. While most text-based documents printed without a hitch, the 1700n used excessive quantities of toner, giving images poor contrast and often an entirely new texture altogether.

Our Excel test, in which black text is printed on a colour background, demonstrated exceptionally bad contrast control. Most mono printers faced with black text against a colour background will dither the colour in order to contrast with the black text, but the 1700n's page was illegible. Those who wish to print text-only reports won't generally notice a problem, although larger fonts again show a surplus of toner.

We liked the remote installation option, which means that a network administrator equipped with the IP addresses of networked machines can install the printer on multiple PCs without needing to visit each one with the driver disc. Unfortunately, the 1700n can't communicate information about toner levels and paper jams via the network. Diagnostic features are available to only locally connected PCs, rather than to networked ones, meaning administrators seeking information about their printer will still need to have it connected to a local print server.

The build quality of the 1700n was good, although we weren't sure that the main door covering the toner cartridge was as rugged as it could be. The toner cartridge and image drum were particularly well designed though, making changing cartridges simple. The manual sheet-feeder, however, could only manage one page at a time, making it fine for single-page special-paper jobs, but impractical for much else.

The 1700n is one of the cheapest networked mono printers on the market, and when we saw its specifications and price we hoped that it would give our current favourite, the Kyocera FS-1020D (see A List, p48), something to worry about.

Unfortunately for Dell, the lack of network features and poor graphics quality mean that we'd advise buyers to stick with the Kyocera.

Author: Dave Stevenson