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Dell Laser Printer 1710N

73

Good

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Pros
Surprisingly affordable running costs
Cons
Text output was too thick and heavy

Pricing: Very Expensive: $299 (11/2/2007)
Performance: Good: 73
Features: Superior: 99
Design: Good: 74

Find out how these four scores, and their relative weights, combine to produce the PC World Rating.

Pricing

Very Expensive: $299

Standard-Capacity Black Cartridge - $100

Performance

Good: 73

Text Printing (Plain Paper, Normal Settings)
Tested Text Speed (ppm)	19.1
Three-Page Word Document (secs)	13.72
Ten-Page Word Document (secs)	31.36
Text Output Quality	Good

Color Printing (Plain Paper, Normal Settings)
Tested Color Speed (ppm)	7.1
Two-Page Excel Document (secs)	11.71
Three-Page PowerPoint Document (secs)	14.93
Color Photo (secs)	24.06

Grayscale Printing (Plain Paper, Normal Settings)
One-Page Grayscale Graphic (secs)	18.43
Grayscale Output Quality	Poor

Lineart Printing (Plain Paper, Best Settings)
Line Art Output Quality	Good

Features

Superior: 99

Memory (in MB)
RAM Installed	32
Maximum Amount of RAM	160

Dimensions
Dimensions	15.9 by 13.9 by 9.72
Weight (pounds)	22.4

Vendor Rated Speeds
B&W Pages per Min.	B&W PPM:27

Resolutions
Max. B&W dpi	1200-by-1200

Language & Emulation
Printer Emulation Type	PostScript
PCL Emulation	PCL: 89 scalable and 2 bitmapped
PostScript Type	PS: 89 scalable and 2 bitmapped

Interfaces
Parallel Port	Yes
Serial Port	No
USB 1.1	Yes
USB 2.0	Yes
Ethernet	Yes
Media Card Readers	None

Drivers
Macintosh	Yes
Windows 98	Yes
Windows NT	Yes
Windows 2000	Yes
Windows XP	Yes
Linux	Yes

Power
Maximum Power Draw (watts)	600
Standby Power Draw (watts)	20

Multifunction Printer Specs
Fax Memory (pages)	0

Paper Handling
Number of Input Trays, Standard	1
Number of Input Trays, Maximum	2
Tray Capacity, pages	250
Maximum Sheets With Optional Paper Trays	800
Manual Feed Slot	Yes
Maximum Paper Size	Legal
Output Tray Capacity	150
Auto Duplexer	No

Warranty & Support
Labor Warranty (years)	One
Parts Warranty (years)	One
Weekday Support Hours	24
Saturday Support Hours	24
Sunday Support Hours	24
Toll-Free Support	Yes

Vendor-Supplied Data (in Pages)
Monthly Duty Cycle	15000
Monochrome Ink/Toner Yields	3000

Bundled Items
Included Hardware	3000-page toner cartridge, 250-sheet standard drawer

Reliability & Service
Summary of results for all of brand's products in this category	Printers are Dell’s weakest category, according to our survey. Readers gave the vendor below-average grades for phone service, ease of use, and reliability.

Reliability of brand's products in this category
Reports of products arriving with problems	Average
Reports of products with any significant problems	Average
Reports of problems that render a product unusable	Average
Buyers' rating of products ease-of-use	Worse than Average
Overall satisfaction with reliability of brand's products in category	Worse than Average

Service & Support Quality
Time spent holding for phone support	Average
Overall quality of vendor's phone support	Worse than Average
Reports of problems unresolved after contacting service	Average
Overall quality of service	Average

Design

Good: 74

Dell Laser Printer 1710n Review

by Paul Jasper

- The $299 Dell Laser Printer 1710n provides networked printing for a small workgroup with surprisingly affordable running costs.

Read Complete Review »

User Reviews for Dell Laser Printer 1710N

Reviewed by: cynicbytrade

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Print speed, easy network setup

Weaknesses: Bad OS X driver, makes noise every ~30 minutes even when in power-save mode

Overall Evaluation: I'm very satisfied with this printer in general considering the low price and high print speed. The print quality is actually the 600/1200 DPI they claim. After the initial physical warm-up, which only occurs when coming out of the power-save mode, the time-to-first-page is just a few seconds, and when printing standard text and line art it seems to be able to keep up with the full 27 PPM speed. If you set the printer to 1200 DPI and print full-page graphics it slows down a bit, but it still prints more than 10 PPM, and may perform better if given more than the standard RAM. Network setup was very easy. In a DHCP environment the printer will obtain an IP address along with the Windows networking information and NTP time server address automatically and then print a sheet showing this information so you can see the address of the printer and ensure that the other settings are correct. Once the printer is on-line any other configuration can be completed via the web interface, though no particular configuration is needed unless you want to use email alerts or other advanced features. I did not attempt to use the non-DHCP network setup, so I cannot comment on that process. The only real problem I had with the printer was the OS X driver. Since it's a postscript-capable printer it's easy enough to just use a generic driver, but you don't get all the printer-specific features without the correct PPD file. Specifically the problem I had with the driver is the PPD was instructing the CUPS printing subsystem to run the filter "pstopsprinter" before sending data to the printer, and that program did not execute correctly on my machine (OS X 10.4). Frankly I don't understand why you need a postscript translater to print to a postscript printer, but I eventually fixed the problem by simply commenting that line from the PPD (thank God for plain-text configuration files) and allowing the printer to get the un-filtered postscript output that was being produced. Since then the printer has worked perfectly. Presumably Dell (or Lexmark, whoever write the drivers) will fix the driver issue in the future, though they'd be well advised to just write the *simplest* print driver possible, which is a plain PPD file with no extra CUPS instructions. OS X generates postscript data. The printer accepts postscript data. Don't muck it up. My only other complaint, and this is a very minor issue, is that the printer has a little 1-second spasm every 20-30 minutes, 24 hours a day. It's not a big deal in general because the duration is short and it's not excessively loud (the printer is relatively quiet even when actually printing) but it's still annoying if you're sitting near the thing in a quiet room. I'd rather have a few more seconds of warm-up time than these occasional spasms.