Dell is the preferred IT supplier for many corporate and public sector employers, so we decided to try out the type of unit that might be supplied to a workgroup in such an environment. First, setting up the printer: the instructions with this unit came in the form of a series of double-sided, glossy, multilingual posters.

It was a shame, however, that a) none of the instructions related to Macs, and b) the printer featured in said posters was an entirely different one to the printer in front of us. Apart from that it was a good effort on Dell’s part. There were also instructional videos on the driver disc: except that they didn’t appear on the Mac part of the disc. The User’s Guide is in HTML format, and is launched by double-clicking on the index.htm file, which will open the page in your default browser.

Opening up the 3130cn to insert the toner cartridges is achieved by pushing a release button on the top-right side of the printer and pulling down the entire front panel. The toner cartridges themselves slot horizontally into the body of the printer and slide home smoothly.

Connecting to our network came next. The basic unit we received didn’t include the separate network protocol adaptor (£105) required for using Bonjour (mDNS) or AppleTalk with the 3130cn. This meant that setting it up on the network involved configuring an IP Address manually using the 2-line x 16-character backlit LCD, a fiddly but achievable job.

Once we’d set up the printer, we moved on to the speed tests. These came out as follows: the one-page Word document printed in 12 seconds, the 10-page Word document in 29 seconds, and the 14-page duplex PDF in 1 minute 13 seconds. The JPEG (at photo quality) took 1 minute 40 seconds to print out.

In terms of output quality, we found the Dell to be among the best of the bunch, with clear differentiation between tones in mid-range, and good solid colours. We should say, however, that it had a slight tendency to wash out the lighter shades and muddy the darker ones.

It’s also worth pointing out that this unit is practically identical to the Xerox 6280DN, which is cheaper.