Review of Dell's 5130cdn Color Laser Printer (printers, price, reviews)
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We are all tempted by extremely low price of Inkjet printers, until we calculate how much we pay for the ink in a year. It really adds up. Laser printers are much more expensive to purchase, but the cartridges last very long, the printing is much faster and the quality is incomparable.
My office bought Dell's 5130cdn, because our research concluded that it has the best ratio between the price and the quality. Also, one can count on Dell to produce high quality, high performance machine, and these days, with so many options, that reputation means a lot.
Our choice has been justified. Our new laser printer is extremely fast: on a regular paper, it prints text at a 25.2 pages per minute (ppm). Graphics speed ranges from 8.3 ppm to 3.2 ppm, depending on the quality of the graphics. Its normal working cycle is up to 110,000-page monthly, exactly the work horse we needed.
Since we wanted to run this printer on our office network, we upgraded the standard memory of 256MB to 1.2GB. The main tray can fit 550 sheets of regular paper. There is also a multipurpose tray, that can fit 150 sheets more. We also purchased a component for stapling and sorting, which was almost a $1000, but was necessary for our needs.
Changing cartridges is very simple, through the front panel. Paper jams are cleared through the side panel, and so far, fortunately, we did not have too many opportunities to use it.
Setting up the printer for different options can be easily done through the computer interface, or through the LCD panel on the printer. It is easy and intuitive, and very few of my office mates ever bothered to read the manual.
The black cartridge can print up to 9000 pages and it costs about $100 to replace. The color cartridges can do up to 6000 pages. Each costs $195 (there are three: cyan, magenta, and yellow.) We calculated that it means that it costs us 1 cent to print a page of black and white text, and 2 cents to print a color page. So, the original price of about $1500 that we paid for the printer will pay off in the long run, as long as this printer continues to be so reliable and hardy.
Have had the 5130 CDN for 13 months now. The consumables are incredibly expensive and only available from Dell. We are constantly having to replace toner, the toner waste container, fuser, etc. They are all high-priced from Dell.
One month out of warranty the printer quit with an error that it needed a new belt unit. Ordered the belt unit (only available from Dell for $375.00) and installed it. At power up it gave us an 006-370 error and said to call for support.
Called for support and wasted a ridiculous amount of time on hold then being transferred to different people.
Finally spoke to a tech support person who ultimately told me that since the printer wasn't under warranty any longer I'd have to order a "Ross Assembly"/print head and have the MCU/ESS board replaced. He also told me I'd have to hire a technician to install these parts as they are not something a customer can do. And he said that I could NOT pay to order the parts from Dell or have a Dell technician do the work, because the printer is out of warranty.
I spoke to his supervisor who treated me like an idiot and told me repeatedly that if I had just paid the extra money for the extended warranty I wouldn't have to worry about arranging to get the printer fixed on my own.
Then I received the following email from Dell:
"The Dell part c399t is not available for sale from Dell as it is recommended to not attempt to replace it. Several parts houses do have it available (found by internet searching Dell C399T), best price for the part only we found is $795.00. This has the potential to be a $1000 repair. The recommended choice would be to replace the printer. If you need anything else please let me know."
So a 13 month old printer that Dell advertises as providing "Superb Performance" and as an "Exceptional Long Term Value" will cost more than its purchase price to repair and they recommend just replacing it. WHAT???
Our university spends literally hundreds of thousands of dollars with Dell every year and this is the "service" they provide.
Dell clearly does not stand behind the products they sell and it seems clear that unless you buy the extended warranty your equipement will fail within days of when the one year warranty expires.
So steer clear of Dell products entirely, especially this printer.
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