Dell Printer 1250c Review

Dell Printer 1250c Review

The printer which is reviewed in this post is from the 1000 series of printers from Dell. It uses Clear LED technology for printing. It’s a colour laser printer of slightly big size (compared with inkjet or basic laser printers), moderate weight and is supposed to be most compact printer as claimed by Dell among similar printers.

Features And specifications:

As stated above, it is claimed to be one of the most compact printer and uses LED technology for printing. In this technology, LED scans a whole strip of page rather than having a laser to create and scan the whole page. Hence, it’s more compact than traditional laser printers.

The main panel consists of buttons to start and stop the work and there are light indicators to show the toner level and for power and informing about some error encountered. The light highlights that the toner is empty and needed to be replaced. The design of the printer is rather conventional. There is paper tray at front which can be folded. This is beneficial to protect the printer from dust particles and decrease the area required when not in use. By default, it doesn’t have network support (a big con).

It comes in typical black colour and has dimension of around 15.6 X 12 inches. Its height is about 9 inches. On the right, the flip cover exposes the four toner inside namely Black, Cyan, magenta and Yellow. According to Dell, the toner can output 700 pages with 7.1 cents per black page and 7.8 for colour page. The unclipping of the four toner cartridges is very straight forward. It should be very easy for anyone to replace the toner. Just pull the clip upwards and toner is out.

The CD which comes along with it for driver installation has driver setup for Windows and Mac. Although it does not provide an official Linux driver, I am pretty sure that some compatible driver would be available for it (I have not confirmed it on Linux).

A setback for me is lack of support to connect multiple PC at the same time. Since it does not have networking functionality, only one computer can be connected to it via USB cable provided along with it. There are ways to connect the printer through networking but that would not be wireless.

Advantage in this printer is that the toner doesn’t have any drums. So, it could save you from drum replacement which occurs in standard laser printers. Cost of the cartridge is a bit expensive, so it is not very ideal solution for homes. However, SME can find this printer pretty good. It costs around Rs 5000-5600 for black cartridge and Rs 5500-6000 for colour cartridge. This makes average cost of printing black as Rs 3-4 and for Colour as Rs 4-4.7. If you print a lot at home then you can consider buying this but there are cheaper printers available with much less cost per print which would be more suitable for homes.

Performance

Dell 1250c has a 192 MHZ processor with 64 Mb RAM. Hence, it cannot be regarded as best in terms of performance. The resolution for black colour printing is 1200 X 600 dpi while for colour printing is 600 X 600 dpi. The start-up of the printer takes around 17 seconds.

I printed a few pages and found the printing speed around 5-7 page per minute. The print speed was average. The quality of print was good. The toner saving mode also printed pages which were clear to read and colour contrast was good too.

Verdict

Dell 120c cost around Rs 17000 and is therefore more suitable for business purpose. For home, a standard inkjet or a mediocre laser printer should be sufficient. Moreover, the toner costs are expensive. There is no networking facility available which is a setback for big organisations.

But if you are looking for a good laser printer with good print quality the Dell 1250c is a pick. For high print demands, it would be very suitable since its speed is decent enough and built quality is also good. The only things which would need investment would be the toners as it does not have drums.