5330DN TONER CARTRIDGE

Dell 5330dn Review

Overview:

While many consumer-electronic stores offer a variety of laser printers, most of the models displayed on the floor aren’t robust or durable enough to handle the demands of medium businesses and classrooms. For a commercial-grade desktop laser printer, one that delivers native 600 dpi and enhanced 1200 dpi at speeds up to 50 ppm, in 2008 Dell offered the 5330dn printer. The 5330dn comes with a duplexer and built-in Gigabit Ethernet. Able to support high-capacity printing on letter or legal-size documents, the Dell 5330dn is a serious printer for businesses and schools that need a fast, reliable printer for the long haul.

Pros:

At first glance this black cube looks like something from the Borg Collective in Star Trek TNG (and if you know what “TNG” stands for, you really are a Trekker). But the Dell 5330dn only assimilates paper.  The cube-like Dell has a 16.3” x 18.7” footprint for easy placement in any corner or credenza.  However with the model starting at 47 pounds, it’ll need a study table.  Paper and toner accessible are all from the front, reducing the need of moving a printer for refilling.

Right from the start the 5330dn comes with some serious paper capacity. The cassette tray can hold a ream of paper from 16# to 32# weights, with sizes ranging from 5 ½” x 8 ½” up to 8 ½” x 14”.  While most desktop laser printers have a multi-purpose tray that only holds from 10 to 50 sheets, the 5330dn’s multi-purpose tray can support up to 100 sheets of your heavier papers and cardstock up to 56#, envelopes, labels, and transparencies. If you need more paper capacity, an additional 500-sheet tray and a 2,100 high-capacity can be attached for over 3,100-page capacity.

A 4-line LCD alphanumeric display with LED indicators provides enough visuals to make it easy to configure and troubleshoot. The keys are intuitive and easy to understand.

The 5330dn can connect directly to a PC using USB or IEEE 1284 parallel connections.  To support network workstations, the Dell comes with switching (10/100/1000 BaseT) gigabit Ethernet controller.

Businesses know that time is money, and so does the Dell 5330dn. The 5330dn saves time by printing 50 single-sided monochrome pages per minute at 600 dpi. In digitally-enhanced 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution, the 5330dn keeps text sharp--even at 6-point font sizes--and does a decent job with graphics. Dell has some of the faster startup times in the printer market. After a 45 second warm-up, each print job starts in less than 8.5 seconds. The built-in duplexer saves money by printing on both sides at 25 pages per minute.

The 5330dn comes with an impressive 256MB of memory right out the box. 256MB enables the Dell to easily handle higher capacity workloads across medium to large network workgroups. An additional memory slot is available to expand printer memory up to 768MB. An 80GB hard drive is available as an additional add-on.

Understanding the printing needs of today’s businesses, Dell has installed the popular PostScript3, PCL6, and PCL5e print emulators. The 5330dn also has 136 scalable PostScript fonts and 93 PCL fonts.

Cons:

While idling at a quiet 28 dB, the printer produces 55 dB of sound printing. To give you an idea of what that means: 60 decibels is the level of typical conversations and 30 decibels is a quiet office.  I recently had the (mis)fortune of having a similar printer sitting next to my desk when a fellow IT’er decided to “test” it--by printing out 500 sheets of paper! If you have a quiet workplace, you don’t want this in anyone’s cubicle, but if placed inside a copy room or a common area, any noise generated from the printer won’t be as noticeable.

State of the art in design, speed, ink capacity, and network connectivity, the 5330dn suffer from having low resolutions. 600 x 600 dpi is fine for text-laden business reports and legal documents, but photographs and images will appear grainy. Fortunately, the 5330dn offers 1200 x 1200 dpi emulation to compensate.