Dell 1815dn review

The paper tray doesn't have a stop at the end, which could spell disaster if you're not paying attention when removing the paper tray. To be fair, though, it does have a stop midway, which will keep the tray from flying out after an enthusiastic tug. Below the output tray is a door that folds out so that you can remove paper jams or change the toner cartridge. A smaller door within that door flips open to serve as the bypass tray for loading single sheets of non-standard media, such as transparencies or labels. The back of the printer has a flap that opens out to serve as an output tray for media fed through the bypass tray.

The 1815dn comes with the 3,000-page toner cartridge standard, which gives quite good value for a laser printer.

Features
The control panel of the Dell 1815dn gives you access to a multitude of features. You can set paper size, reduce or enlarge copied images, autofit or clone copies, input paper type, select advanced fax features and change scan resolutions, among other things. The scanner bed can accommodate paper sizes only up to A4, but the duplexer has a dedicated scanner (called the platen) that allows you scan up to legal-size pages. You can initiate scans from the printer's control panel or -- if you install the included software -- from your computer, using any number of applications, including Dell ScanCenter, PaperPort or Adobe Photoshop.

If you use Dell's Network Scan utility, you can scan a document to your networked computer as a JPEG, a TIFF or a PDF. You can also send out scans via email directly from the printer. In addition, if you plug in a USB flash drive to the front-mounted USB 1.1 port, you can scan directly to the USB drive -- or print directly from the USB drive, using the Print From option on the control panel.

Faxing presents another host of options. You can set it up so that outgoing and incoming faxes are automatically sent to certain email addresses, or set up a secure receive option, which will not print your incoming faxes until you enter a passcode, handy for secure transmissions. You can also hook the printer up to an answering machine and the printer will assess the incoming call signal to determine whether it's a fax or a phone call. Phone calls will go through to the answering machine (and the telephone) and faxes will be received by the 1815dn.

Performance
Strangely enough, the Dell 1815dn printed greyscale graphics (20.01ppm) faster than it did black text (17.75ppm). The similarly priced Canon ImageClass MF5750 clocked 14.80ppm for black text and 16.11ppm for greyscale graphics. The 1815dn printed our PowerPoint presentation at an impressive 17.87ppm. It scanned colour documents at 4.86ppm and greyscale documents at 4.85ppm, both faster than the Canon MF5750. The Dell 1815dn rocked the copy test, spitting out copies at 12.29ppm.

The Dell 1815dn excelled at black print quality. Even at 2.5 points, the black text was legible. Looked at under a loupe, the letters were clean and the edges were crisp. The printer handled greyscale prints decently, though it couldn't escape the dithering that plagues laser printers when printing half-tones. The 1815dn also handled greyscale scans decently, but was less successful with colour scans. The colours appeared washed-out on the screen, and what should have been light grey lines disappeared altogether. In both the greyscale and the colour scans, the scanner couldn't capture details in either the shadows or the highlights.

Edited by Charles McLellan
Additional editing by Nick Hide