TONER CARTRIDGE for DELL 5210N LASER PRINTER

Dell 5210n 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 1200 dpi at speeds up to 40 ppm, Dell offers the Dell 5210N monochrome printer.

Pros:

Dell has a tendency to rebadge printers from other manufacturers with their emblem, and the 5210N is no exception.  While the printer housing and control panel is redesigned, the internal parts of the 5210N are interchangeable with the Lexmark T640 printer. The angular Dell has a 17.4” x 20” footprint for easy placement in any corner or credenza.  However with this model starting at 43 pounds, it’ll need a study table.  Paper and toner are all accessible from the front, reducing the need of moving a printer for refilling. 

Right from the start the 5210N comes with some serious paper capacity. The cassette tray can hold a ream of paper 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 25 to 50 sheets, the 5210N’s multi-purpose tray can support up to 100 sheets of your heavier papers and cardstock, envelopes, labels, and transparencies. If you need more paper capacity, you can stack additional 500-sheet trays to the 5210N, to gain a maximum capacity of 2,600 sheets.  For a business that needs to print a lot of envelopes, Dell/Lexmark offers an optional 85-envelope feeder.

The 5210N prints 40 monochrome pages per minute at 600 dpi. In digitally-enhanced 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution, this Dell keeps text sharp--even at 6-point font sizes--and does a decent job with graphics. The 5210N does not come stock with a duplexer, but one can be purchased.

The Dell comes with 64MB of memory, with an extra slot to increase storage up to a maximum of 576MB, allowing the Dell to easily handle higher capacity workloads across a heavy network. The 5210N can connect directly to a PC using USB 2.0 connections and to support network workstations, the Dell comes with switching 10/100 BaseT Ethernet controller.

Understanding the printing needs of today’s businesses, Dell has installed the popular PostScript3 and PCL6 print emulators.

Cons:

While idling at a quiet 27 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 chugging away near 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.