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Dell 2145cn colour laser

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Review Dell’s 2145cn is a mid-range multifunction device, designed for small office and modest workgroup use, but includes several, big-machine functions. Unusually, it’s also built around a colour laser engine.

Dell’s 2145cn: multifunctional with duplex Printing and scanning

There’s only one thing you can be pretty certain of with a Dell printer – it’ll be black. It could come from a variety of sources – Lexmark and Samsung are favourites – and be either good or poor value, but it’ll not have coloured covers. The 2145cn is tall enough to be slightly awkward on the desk, particularly if you add the optional, 500-sheet paper tray.

In fact, you’re probably going to need this, as the machine comes as standard with capacity for only 250 sheets, which is barely enough. Even with the 100-sheet multipurpose tray, which swings down from the front, you’ll still be filling the main tray too often.

Set on top of the printer section is a substantial scanner, complete with 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF), which is a much more sensible capacity. It’s a duplex scanner, too, so can scan both sides of a document in a single job. Indeed, duplex scanners are rare on machines in this price-range.

In front of the scanner is a well laid out set of controls, centred around a two-line by 16-character LCD display. To the left of this is a set of up to 30, quick-dial fax buttons and to the right is a number pad for less frequently faxed contacts. In between display and number pad are special function keys for enlargement, duplex print and USB print, among others. At the extreme right are large, coloured buttons for starting and stopping copy and scan jobs. All pretty obvious stuff, which makes the 2145cn easy to use, with little specialist training needed.

Well-configured control panel, with plenty of fax options

Just below the control panel on the right is a USB drive socket, for walk-up Printing. There are two schools of thought on walk-up print. It’s certainly very convenient to be able to bring files to a printer on a pocket drive and produce copies directly, as it is to scan material straight to file. It does represent an obvious security risk, though, even if access is protected via PIN, as it can be here. However, once you have access, there’s little to stop you scanning paper documents to the USB drive.

Set up is reasonable straightforward, as the printer uses combined drum and toner cartridges for each colour of print. Fold down the front panel and you have access to the cartridges, stacked one above the other. Software installation is also simple and Dell provides both PCL 6 in emulation and genuine Adobe Postscript Level 3. Drivers are available for Windows, from 2000 on and in 32 and 64-bit variants, OSX from 10.3 and Linux. Distributions supported include Red Hat 8-9, Fedora Core 1-4, Mandrake 9.2-10.1 and Suse 8.2-9.2.

A tall machine, because the cartridges are stacked up

Having duplex print support in a mid-range colour laser is unusual but, when combined with duplex scanning, it opens up several new copy combinations. It’s easy enough to copy single-sided sheets to a duplex output document using the ADF. It’s also possible to produce a duplex copy from a duplex original, though some fiddling is needed on the control panel, to set up the right options.

Dell claims a top print speed of 20ppm for this machine, in both black and colour. As usual, the speed is a best-case result and in the real world, where you’re twiddling your thumbs waiting for a print job to complete, you’re looking at speeds between 7ppm and 14ppm, depending on the length of the document.

At 7ppm, the kind of speed you’ll see for typical five-page prints, you could find yourself waiting for jobs to complete, particularly if the 2145cn is highly utilised. Documents containing colour don’t take any longer than straight black text jobs, though. Duplex text pages take around twice the speed of the simplex page, which is what you’d expect.

A five page, black text copy from the ADF took 36 seconds, which is a reasonable speed, but a 10-page, duplex copy took 3m 50s, which is slow. This is a shame, as we suspect most people will go for simplex copying to save time, rather than saving paper. Print quality is above average. Black text from the 600dpi print engine is sharp and shows no signs of spatter. Print is heavy enough to be seen clearly, without overdoing emboldened characters and printed rules.

Socket to me: handy USB port (right) for file Printing or scanning using a flash drive

Colours in business graphics are over-vivid, in some cases taking them quite a way from the originals seen on screen. Although you can use colour matching to improve things, when using default settings the colours vary more than with some rival models. It’s slightly unexpected, then, that our test photo print reproduced rather better, with more natural colours and good levels of detail. A 15 x 10cm photo completed in 36 seconds.

We had problems Printing from some USB drives, where the machine registered the insertion of the drive, but didn’t come up with a folder and file display, so we couldn’t select files for Printing. Other drives work as expected. Scans from both flatbed and ADF were fair, though suffered a bit from over-emphasis of colour. The scanner can scan at up to 600 x 1200dpi and in 24-bit colour.

The ADF takes 50 sheets, but the paper tray only 250

The drum and toner cartridges are the only consumables in this machine and are available in two capacities. Supplied as standard are a 2,500-page black cartridge and three, 2,000-page colour ones, but 5,500 and 5,000 page, high-yield cartridges are also available. The transfer belt also needs to be replaced, but only every 50,000 pages.

Using the high-yield figures gives costs per page of 2.51p for a black page and 10.5p for a colour one. Neither of these page costs is particularly high, when compared with other machines aimed at the same market. In fact, the colour page cost is around 0.5p below average.

Looking at the total cost of ownership, which takes into account purchase price, running costs and the cost of maintenance, which in this case will be quite low, this looks like quite an inexpensive multifunction to run. The only element that will push the maintenance costs up is the small size of the standard paper tray. After all, if you’re buying the 2145cn as a general-purpose office machine, you’re likely to tire of having to stick a half-ream of paper into it several times a week.

Verdict

This is a very versatile multifunction printer, which can produce all kinds of simplex and duplex copies, as well as faxes and scans. Although we had some problem Printing from USB, this may relate to particular brands of drive. You could make considerable paper savings with this machine, though print costs themselves are higher than average.

A few minor glitches take the edge off what is basically a very versatile Printing and copying tool.

Suggested Price: £689

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