Product Reviews

Dell's Multifunction Laser Printer 1815dn is based around a fast laser printer. It can make black-and-white prints and copies, and can scan, but not print, in colour. It has a standard network interface and a duplexer that allows it to print on both sides of a sheet of paper. Its 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) is useful for making unattended copies or faxes of long documents.

Like most printers, you need to remove a small amount of packing material from the 1815dn before it's ready to print. You also need to unlock the scanner's head using a sliding switch on the base of the scan bed, which is a bit fiddly. Dell's setup program detected the 1815dn across our network and made the installation fairly straightforward. Unusually, this printer has GDI drivers for host-based printing, but also supports both PCL6 and PostScript 3 print languages. The installer can add drivers for all three in a single operation.

The 1815dn can print supported document types directly from a memory key inserted into its USB port. It can also make scans to

Frustratingly, the 1815dn's TWAIN driver doesn't support network scanning. It can push basic scans to a selected PC, but for more control you'll need to connect via USB. Scans proved very fast; even at the scanner's maximum 600dpi resolution, capturing a 6x4" photo took just 15 seconds. All scan results were sharply focused, though a little too light. The scanner wasn't able to preserve detail in the lightest and darkest parts of a document, but its images were more than good enough for general office needs.

The 1815dn was also fast in our print tests, particularly when we tested using its GDI and PCL drivers. Text was printed quickly using the PostScript driver, but the printer was much slower to produce complex graphical jobs, delivering our Normal speed document at just 5.5 pages per minute (ppm). Using the GDI driver for duplex printing, we printed our 50-page text document at an impressive 16.6ppm.

Text was crisp and black no matter which driver we used, but PostScript graphics appeared a little too dark by default. Copies were also too dark at the default settings, but the Text and Photo mode improved them. Single-page copies each took just 10 seconds, and copying a 10-page document using the ADF took only 52 seconds.

The 1815dn is a fast, well-specified MFP that's easy to set up. It uses only a single consumable and has low running costs, making it an ideal multifunction peripheral for a moderately busy office.