Color Laser Roundup: Dell Color Laser Printer 5100cn

All of our reviewers admired the performance of the Dell 5100cn, while two out of the three reviewers we surveyed thought the print quality was excellent. In addition, they all admired the expandability and duplexing (double-side) feature. On the whole, this looks to be an excellent small business color laser.

Price: $999.00
Type: Color laser printer
Max. Print Speed: Black: 35ppm. Color: 25ppm
Max. Print Resolution: 600 x 600 dpi
Special Feature(s): Easily upgradeable. Duplex (double-sided) printing.

InfoWorld Review

Rating: 7.4 out of 10

Liked: The 5100cn’s single-pass engine means fewer moving parts that might potentially break down, and it offers easy access to almost all areas where paper might jam. Simple design makes the 5100cn easy to set up. On average the 5100cn’s speeds compared well with more expensive competitors. Text looked evenly weighted, crisp, and very black, yet remained clean even at small sizes. On graphics, colors appeared saturated without popping off the page.

Disliked: Frequent auto-recalibration caused intermittent, annoying delays.

In Short: Considering its modest price, Dell’s 5100cn delivers surprisingly good print quality at speeds that can satisfy an ordinary workgroup of as many as 20 people. It’s easy to operate and is inexpensive to maintain, although paper-handling options are somewhat expensive. Dell also built a Web site into the 5100cn to track the printer’s status remotely over a network.

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PC Magazine Review

Rating: 3 out of 5

Liked: Photo quality is in the top tier for color lasers. Good performance for the price. Maximum capacity with optional paper trays is 2,150 sheets.

Disliked: Text quality, at just short of very good, is relatively low for a laser printer.

In Short: The Dell Laser Printer 5100cn color laser offers reasonably good performance, duplexing, and the option to boost paper capacity from 650 sheets to 2,150. Output quality is mixed, with better than average photos, middling graphics, and worse-than-average text compared with that of other color lasers.

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PC World Review

Rating: 4 out of 5

Liked: This printer allows you to add enough paper drawers at once to achieve a sizeable input capacity. A built-in duplexer lets you print double-sided pages. The 5100cn should be reasonably economical to run. We also clocked the 5100cn as one of the fastest color lasers in our performance tests.

Disliked: Though its text printing wasn't too bad, we did see some jagged and fuzzy edges in lettering. On color photos, we saw good detail in shadows, but dot patterns were too visible in light areas, contributing to the photo's general softness.

In Short: The Dell Laser Printer 5100cn is fast and should be an economical choice for a workgroup that plows through paper, but its image quality could have been better.

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