With a price tag of just $99 direct, the Dell Laser Printer 1100 doesn't have to offer much else to stir up interest. But the good news is that in addition to being extremely affordable, it delivers respectable performance, excellent text quality, and better-looking graphics than most monochrome lasers at any price. And at 8.5 by 14.1 by 11.7 inches (HWD) it's small enough to fit on a desk, taking up less space than most ink jets do.

Setup is simpler than for most ink jets, too. Install one toner cartridge, plug in the USB cable, pick Typical Installation from the first screen in the setup program, and everything else is automatic. Hit the Finish button on the second screen, and you're ready to print.

Output quality is the best we've seen from lasers that cost $250 or less, and it compares favorably with monochrome lasers that are far more expensive. In particular, the 1100 scored slightly better on quality overall than the HP LaserJet 1020 (see our review of this printer soon), which also offers better output quality than most inexpensive lasers.

The 1100's excellent rating for text means it can handle any text document you need to print. More than half the test fonts were easily readable at 4 points, and none needed more than 8. Graphics were also impressive. We saw some minor to moderate dithering and a tendency for extremely thin lines to break up. But the good rating is near the top of the heap for monochrome lasers. The output is certainly good enough for things like school work and internal business use.

Photos are a little better than newspaper quality, making them good enough for, say, family or client newsletters. The high end of fair rating is midrange for monochrome lasers; but, of course, if you need better-quality photos, you should be looking at an ink jet or a color laser.

Performance is surprisingly good for the 15-pages-per-minute Samsung engine the printer is built around. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com) we clocked the 1100 at 10 minutes 49 seconds, compared with 10:12 for the 19 ppm LaserJet 1020 and 8:09 for the 22 ppm Samsung ML-2250. The 1100 even matched the ML-2250 on four of the 13 tests in the suite, and was only 2 to 3 seconds behind in four others. Most of the difference in the totals came from the two 50-page Microsoft Word documents. Quite simply, the 1100 won't feel sluggish for most files you're likely to print.

Paper handling is a potential Achilles' heel, as the 1100 has only a 150-page input capacity. But refilling the tray shouldn't become a chore unless you regularly print at least 50 pages a day. A more important issue we ran into was a tendency to feed two or more pages at once. We saw this several times in our tests, resulting in blank pages in the middle of a document and once causing a paper jam.

According to Dell, this indicates a problem with the particular printer we were testing. And, indeed, we saw only one double feed in about 500 pages on a second unit. Dell also says that if a customer called with the same problem, the company would simply replace the printer, as it did for us. Even if this turns out to be a common problem with the 1100, however, unless you print a great deal, it should be no more than an occasional annoyance.

Another minor annoyance is that the bundled toner cartridge is rated for only 1,000 pages, and low toner warnings started showing on our screen after about 500 pages. Standard cartridges, rated at 2,000 pages, are $65 direct from Dell—two-thirds of the cost of buying a new printer. That sounds like a lot, but the claimed 3.25 cents per page for toner is within a reasonable range for a low-price laser. The LaserJet 1020, for example, claims 3.4 cents per page. And of all the laser printers we've tested that cost $200 or less, only the Samsung ML-1740 has a lower claimed cost per page.

The simple truth is that the Dell Laser Printer 1100 delivers good value overall. And it's hard to go wrong at this price.

Compare the printers mentioned above side by side.

Quality ratings: Text: Graphics: Photos:

More laser printer reviews:

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.