Dell V305W All-in-One Printer

The control panel's layout, though very simple, has some quirks. You surf menu options, shown on the two-line OLED text display, using two navigation buttons and a third, big button labeled with a checkmark. The display also shows ink levels, but you can't tell which cartridge is which. It's also hard to guess how to wake up the printer; you're supposed to press an arrow button, but Dell doesn't document this explicitly.

In our tests, the Dell ranged from awesome to adequate. It blasted through plain-text documents at a rate of 10.7 pages per minute--more than twice as fast as Epson's Stylus NX400. The text itself was black and crisp. But when we sent color photos and other graphics through the pipeline, the V305W slowed considerably, to 1.2 ppm or less. Images printed on plain paper looked anemic; on Dell's own photo paper, the same images smoothed out and looked a little yellow, but had nice detail. Scan and copy quality were mediocre: dark, rough, and fuzzy.

The ink costs will make your jaw drop. The machine ships with a standard-size black cartridge and a tricolor cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Each of these cartridges lasts for a mere 125 pages in a best-case scenario. The (relatively) high-yield versions of the cartridges offer little relief: A 210-page black cartridge costs $19, which translates into 9 cents per page, while the corresponding color cartridge costs $25 and last 190 pages, or 13.2 cents per page.

It's too bad about the inks, because the V305W is a nice printer in many ways. But even if you don't print all that much, you'll notice the dent in your wallet fairly quickly. And unfortunately, this printer doesn't print money.