Dell B1260dn Mono Laser Printer

By M. David Stone

The Dell B1260dn Mono Laser Printer sits on the cusp between personal printer and shared printer for a micro or small office. Small enough to comfortably share a desk with, it can serve nicely as a heavy-duty personal printer in any size office. Thanks to its network connector and reasonably capable paper handling, however, it's also suitable as a shared printer. Most important, it can be a good fit in either role.

The B1260dn is a close competitor to the Editors' Choice Brother HL-2270DW , with a similar price, size, and paper capacity. However, the two offer a notably different balance of speed, output quality, and running costs.

Setup and Speed
At 7.8 by 13.7 by 13.3 inches (HWD), the B1260dn is smaller than many inkjets, but big enough to include a 250-sheet tray, a one-sheet manual feed, and a built-in duplexer for printing on both sides of the page. (Note that at this writing, some of Dell's marketing material shows the manual feed tray as having a 10-page capacity, but this is a typo that Dell says it's in the process of fixing.)

Setting up the printer is typical for the breed. For my tests, I connected it to a wired network and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista.

On our business applications suite I clocked the printer (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at an effective 8.3 pages per minute (ppm). That's significantly slower than the HL-2270DW's 11.7 ppm, but keep in mind that the Brother printer's speed is one of the reasons it's an Editors' Choice. The B1260dn's speed is more typical for its price range. The Samsung ML-2165W , for example, came in at 7.6 ppm.

Output Quality and Running Cost
Output quality is one of the B1260dn's stronger points, particularly for text and graphics. Text quality is at the high end of the range where most mono lasers fall, making it easily good enough for almost any business purpose. It's also good enough for at least some less demanding types of desktop publishing applications, although exactly where you draw the line will depend on how much of a perfectionist you are.

Graphics quality is at the high end of what you can expect from a mono laser. That makes the output good enough for almost any business purpose, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Most people will also consider it suitable for graphics in, say, a report going to an important client or customer. Photo quality is at the low end of the tight range that most lasers fall into, making it good enough to print Web pages with recognizable photos, but a little short of the quality you'd probably want for photos in client newsletters or the like.

Running cost, unfortunately, is not a strong point. The claimed 3.3 cents per page for the B1260dn isn't unusual for a printer in this price range, but it is 1.2 cents more than the HL-2270DW's cost per page. That works out to $120 difference for 10,000 pages. You might want to factor this into the total cost of ownership, based on how much you expect to print, when you compare prices between printers.

If you expect to print enough for the running cost to be an important issue, or you care more about speed than output quality, you should obviously be looking closely at the HL-2270DW. On the other hand, if high-quality text and graphics is more important, the Dell B1260dn Mono Laser Printer does the better job. Ultimately, it earns lots of points for its text and graphics quality as well as for its paper handling, and it's easy to recommend as a more than reasonable choice.

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