Inkjet users- Isn’t it time to move up to laser? Inkjet printers took the world over with their promise to print quality photos at home but how many photos do you really print these days? Don’t you just post the pictures on Facebook and Instagram or show them off on your tablet? So why do you still have that inkjet printer around the house?
Inkjet printers don’t give a crisp, professional look that laser does. The ink smudges, the paper is often soggy, and what was once cutting edge is now just taking up space in your home unless you’re always printing color photos for grandparents that love hanging photos on the fridge or for the kids’ school projects.
It’s time to upgrade but what do you get? If you’re like our family, you need something that will print documents in color for work and have the ability to serve as a copier and scanner.
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| Dell 1355cnw Multifunction Color Printer |
Dell’s 1355cnw Multifunction Color Printer provides color laser printing, copying, scanning, and faxing for $419 MSRP ($299 direct from Dell with rebates). Sounds pretty good, right? Let’s run through its capabilities.
Printing
15 pages per minute black and white, 12 per minute in color. This won’t break any laser printer speed records, but it’s respectable. The print resolution is 600 dots per inch that is standard for a home or office laser printer. Black and white Word documents are extremely sharp. Color printouts of webpages and other multimedia documents are great. Color images have a slight gloss to them when printed on regular printer paper. But if you’re looking for this to print high quality photos on photo paper, this isn’t the printer for you.
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| Flatbed and autofeed scanner technology! |
Scanning
Hooray for the automatic document feeder to scan a stack of documents AND flatbed glass for things like books. Like the printer, the document feeder and the scanner aren’t the world’s fastest but what it lacks in speed, it makes up for in the quiet factor.
We have an all-in-one from another manufacturer that makes a terrible racket while scanning. It rivals dial up modem sounds from the 90s and is so loud that I try not to scan multiple page documents while the kids are asleep.
Not so with the Dell. It’s quiet, slow, and steady. By steady, I mean that the auto-document feeder seems well constructed. It handled auto feeding my husband’s latest expense report with ease despite the many receipts and boarding passes taped to blank pages. No jams, no pages stuck together, no ominous plastic gear breaking sounds. It worked beautifully!
The Dell 1355cnw scans at 1200 dots per inch, which is about the mid-range for a multi-function device. That’s more than enough for scanning/faxing documents and certainly great for scanning pictures, receipts, etc. The unit comes with PaperPort software for organizing your scans. It seems to work pretty well except that the interface between PaperPort and the scanner driver asks you multiple times about scan settings, quality, etc. PaperPort does it once and the scanner driver asks you again. It’s also not smart enough to recognize whether or not there is something waiting in the document feeder. You need to manually choose whether to scan the flat glass versus read in documents from the multi-sheet-feeder. While I wish it was better at remembering for efficiency purposes, I still appreciate how quiet it is.
Faxing
Faxing. It faxes. Do you? Since faxing seems old school, I didn’t test this feature. These days, people tend to prefer “scan and email” over faxing, but it’s good to know that it’s there if I need it at some point. Like when people start including fax numbers on their business cards again.
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| Tape dispenser (L) included to provide scale. This printer is large! |
Setup
Once you unbox the beast from the box, setup is a breeze. I removed the packing material and a few pieces of tape, and it was ready to go. I got to the bottom of the box and wondered if I had any toner cartridges. The Dell 1355cnw comes with its toner cartridges pre-installed, which makes setup much easier than I was expecting. The Dell 1355cnw takes 4 toner cartridges. The black cartridge is larger, followed by equally sized Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow cartridges.
Interfaces
The Dell 1355cnw supports USB, Ethernet, and WiFi. Upon initial installation, I hooked it up via USB to a Windows 7 machine. Windows 7 offered to immediately install the proper drivers. Clicking OK was probably a mistake. I ended up with print drivers but none of the other Dell utilities for scanning, checking status, etc. On my second go-round, I used the CD that came with the printer. The unit also comes with a USB port on the front for “PC-free printing.” It doesn’t have memory card slots like an InkJet printer would, but they’re not really needed because you typically wouldn’t print digital photos on this printer. You could but it wouldn’t be as high quality as an inkjet.
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| Paper door on the Dell 1355cnw |
Design
The overall dimensions of the Dell 1355cnw are 18 inches deep, 16 inches wide, and just over 13 inches tall. Its footprint is larger than the other printers we currently own- a black and white laser and color inkjet. The depth was measured with the paper tray open/stocked, which is required in order to, you know, print.
That’s one thing I don’t understand about this printer. You have to have a front door flap open in order to put normal letter sized paper inside. I understand that it’s designed this way to keep the entire unit small, lightweight, low-cost, and easier to ship. In some other printers, the paper tray is this bulge from the front/back of the unit. But with the Dell 1355cnw, the door opens up taking up a bunch of desk space and then the paper only sticks out a little bit.
There’s a translucent cover over the 150 page paper tray, but it doesn’t cover the end of the paper. Only the top. It appears that the paper tray and door were designed to allow for full-time use with legal paper. But who does that? A law office? They probably buy a higher-end printer with two paper trays costing tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a little bit odd, but definitely not a showstopper.
On the plus side, finished print jobs are delivered out the front of the printer and are caught by a retractable arm. It doesn’t stick out any farther than the open paper door on the bottom and it keeps the printouts from falling all over the floor. Certainly a nice feature.
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| The toner comes installed in the printer |
Toner Cost
Dell sells 700 page toner cartridges from $38 (black) to $49 (each color). For high volume printing, you can get a 2,000 page black toner cartridge for $69, and 1,400 page color cartridges for $49 each. Generic toner can be purchased for much less and found easily through a Google search.
Many low cost laser printers have reduced their costs by putting the drum onto the toner cartridge, resulting in increased maintenance costs each time you want to replace the toner. Dell claims that both the drum and fuser unit (the expensive parts of a laser printer) are designed to last the life of the printer without being replaced. Your only incremental costs should be toner.
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| Toner cartridges are easy to replace via the side panel |
Networking
After initial printing and scanning through the USB port, it was time to get advanced. I wanted to put the printer on my wireless network and then try printing from a both Macs and PCs over the network. I put the original CD back in and this time, clicked on the button for networked setup. It said that my printer was not already on the network and it guided me through typing in my wireless network name and secret key. The printer rebooted and then joined the network.
Mac Compatibility
Some of you have probably jumped down to this section. Many all-in-one machines won’t work with Macs. The Dell 1355cnw comes with a fully supported Mac printer driver. The printer even supports Apple’s Bonjour printer discovery service. I installed the drivers and was able to print without issue.
Mac users won’t exactly have full-featured scanning though. Scanning to a Mac has to be performed from the printer’s screen, and then the resulting image can be sent to your Mac with FTP or SMB. It appears that the Dell 1355cnw can scan a document and then email it to you. That’s probably the best way for Mac users to scan. If you need to do advanced scanning, tweaking settings, scanning only parts of the page, etc, then you’ll need to scan from a PC.
Pros
- Color laser printer!
- Quiet printing and scanning.
- Ethernet, WiFi
Cons
- No duplex-printing option for automatic double-sided printing.
- A color laser printer won’t print photo-quality images like an inkjet. Laser printers just aren’t meant for that.
- Paper tray design and appearance is a little funky
Summary
The Dell 1355cnw Multifunction Color Printer produces clean, crisp laser quality documents in color at a very low price. Its document feeder, flatbed scanning, and faxing capabilities provide all the features you expect from an all-in-one. With USB, Ethernet, and WiFi, and Mac printing support, it would be a great upgrade for home office or small office environments.
I received the Dell 1355cnw for review purposes. No additional compensation was received and all opinions are my own. Photos without watermarks courtesy of Dell. Amazon affiliate links included in this post.
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Original post by Tech Savvy Mama
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Does this unit work on incoming digital phone lines from comcast?
Thank you
I have read a couple of comments saying that this printer does NOT support digital phone lines. You should contact Dell for an answer.