"I've had several clients buy these printers and in large, they've been happy with them. A few things to keep in mind:

1. If you want good support, purchase the upgraded support plan. Dell support is all about "you get what you pay for"- the free / basic plans are cheap but poor (offshore, long hold times, long part replacement times. "Business" support plans are responsive and good (US-based, short hold times, next-day parts delivered on-site).

2. The PCL drivers for the printer have numerous issues- they don't retain color preference, and sometimes won't print multiple copies properly when printing through a windows print server. We found that switching to the provided postscript drivers worked much better. However, they don't work under windows 2000. Fortun

3. If you will be working with large / complex documents, upgrade the memory. The complaints many have here about documents larger than 40 pages having problems or 13MB 2-page PDFs taking minutes per page are likely due to the printer running short of memory. The base memory is anemic, and relatively inexpensive to upgrade. This will restore speed for large jobs.

4. Some have complained about print quality degrading over time- this is solved by replacing the non-toner consumables as suggested. The imaging drum and transfer roller have 40k page lifespans, and print quality will degrade near the end of that life. ALL of the parts that are responsible for print quality in the printer are replaceable, so there's no reason why an older printer shouldn't have great quality with new consumables. This is true for all laser printers.

Overall, it's a fast, workhorse machine that works very well for "standard" business graphics (power points, charts, etc...). You wouldn't want to print your brochure on it, nor your photos, but that's not what it is meant for. "

    "Keep in mind that you'll only be able to get supplies for this printer from Dell - a fact that I wish I had considered. The colors are muddy and muted and it takes a lot of tweaking to get colors where they should be. Cost per print is high if doing large color areas. I switched from a Tektronix solid ink printer (the printer head went out and it was cheaper to buy this printer than a part for the Tektronix) and the color can't even come close to comparing. If you don't have any high quality/volume color printer to compare it to - you'll probably be happy - otherwise - I'd probably choose something else. It's a case of you get what you pay for. Take the total cost of ownership, and the only being able to get supplies from Dell into consideration before making this purchase.

Speed for graphic intensive work is about 1 page a minute for two sided printing! That's for a 13 MB .pdf file. "

    " What a stone cold beast. I print 2,000-5,000 color postcards a month. HP was killing me with consumables with 6 page per minute color. With my printing needs easily getting 20+ a minute. These are cheaper and last longer. Would have been a perfect 10 if it could handle heavy stock in the 1,000 sheet bin. For $550, you have a problem if you dont buy this printer. Its big though, MAKE WAY!!! "

    "This is an O.K. printer overall but the design flaws keeps it from being a great printer.You can't use photo paper either. I bought a ton of Dell?s own photo quality paper just to ensure compatibility only to yield 100% bad prints. The ink actually gummed up all over the glossy paper and must have left material on the drum because the next run of standard doc files had random patterns of ink all over them. As a product developer I detect that this was an OEM printer out of China private labeled for Dell and little attention was paid to quality. In other words I think this was Dell's shortcut to get into the high volume Laser Printer market without any development costs.

If you already have this printer you can work around the goofy "calibration routine" bug by segmenting your print run in 40 page groups.Otherwise you can expect two groups of 40 or so pages each followed by dozens of groups of two to three pages each. It's as if the printer starts running out of gas!

Dell makes decent computers but this printer is a thousand dollar boat anchor. "

    "Pros: Our students only pay .10/page to print color, however expect smudging and streaking. So we do a lot of refunds. It is fast but so what if the prints are crap.

Cons: After a while the colors on a print smear and streak as being printed. It as if teh toner cannot get on the page at the rate it is travaling through the printer."