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.