Product Reviews

Dell's Laser Printer 1710n is one of the cheapest network-ready laser printers you can buy. Brother's HL-2070N, which we reviewed in What's New, Shopper May 2005, costs less, but we were unimpressed with its curled-paper output and high running costs.

Although small, the 1710n is quite a boxy device. It's made from the same austere blue plastic as many other Dell laser printers we've seen, but it looks smart and business-like. It arrives with its consumables in place, but these must be extracted for the easy removal of some packing material and replaced before you print.

The starter toner has a capacity of 3,000 pages, which is reasonable for this class of printer, and 6,000-page replacements are available for £58. The drum is good for 30,000 pages and costs just £31 to replace. The printer's running costs work out at less than 1.1p per page. This

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is lower than four of the printers in our Labs test of workgroup lasers in Shopper January 2006, which are all designed for higher-volume use.

Once connected to our test network, the 1710n automatically printed a configuration page confirming its network host name and the IP address it had leased. This can be essential information when setting up a network printer, so it's useful to have, but the installer's search utility quickly discovered the 1710n on our network automatically.

The printer has an engine speed of 26 pages per minute (ppm), and our testing confirmed that it's no slouch. Printing with the PCL driver, it delivered our 50-page text document at more than 24ppm, dropping only slightly to 21.5ppm on our more complex mixed-colour test. Using the PostScript driver, the 1710n peaked at 24.4ppm when printing 50 copies of our single-page letter.

Complex PostScript jobs can tax a printer's processor, and the Dell dropped to just 8.3ppm when we repeated our mixed-colour test using the PostScript driver. Unusually, this printer was slightly quicker to print photos when using its PostScript driver, and the results were better.

The 1710n produced high-quality results on most of our tests, although some graphics were very dark with either driver. Like other Dell printers we've tested, the 1710n comes with no Mac drivers, but PC users will find it an effective and economical printer for small workgroup or heavy home use