Dell's Color Laser Printer 1320c is designed for a small office, workgroup or home office. With its surprisingly affordable upfront cost, the 1320c would seem to be just the thing for its target market. But while output quality is pretty good for the price point, we found this printer to be lacking in some aspects; this may present issues for some users.

First of all, we are disappointed by the 1320c's print speeds. Dell specifies 16ppm for monochrome printing and 12ppm for color, but that is a bit misleading because the print driver assumes you're always printing color. To get the faster speed for monochrome, you must manually select black-and-white printing each time you print a document, something most of us don't have the patience to do.

Output quality is good for text, monochrome images and color images. Text is readable even at very small font sizes, and color images are generally sharp, with no banding or other issues.

To keep the 1320c's price low, Dell cut some corners. Connectivity is limited to USB; it does come with a 10/100BASE-T Ethernet function, but it requires a $50 adapter for activation. If you intend to use the Dell 1320c on a network, you'll need to include the cost of an external print server in your budget; Dell offers one for $50. Paper handling is skimpy for business use, with only a single 250-sheet paper tray and a single-slot manual feed. The output bin can handle up to 150 pages.

The 1320c also loses a few points for its user interface and controls, which are a hodgepodge of blinking lights that take multiple pages in the manual to explain. Chances are you'll never need to decipher the meaning of the various lights, but keep the instruction manual handy just in case.

The Dell Color Laser Printer 1320c delivers surprisingly high-quality text and images for its price range, but if you need to share the printer with others, you may find some of the cost tradeoffs -- namely lackluster print speeds and the lack of built-in networking -- to be deal-breakers.


Pros: Budget-friendly price, good output quality for both color and monochrome images
Cons: No built-in networking, slow print speeds, limited paper capacity

Warranty
1 year, limited