Review: Dell 5130cdn Color Laser

Designed for offices that need a workhorse printer, the Dell 5130cdn has the speed and features to make it a winner.

"Dell's 5130cdn color laser printer aims high--and on nearly all counts, it succeeds. It has the speed and features that a high-volume office needs, and it's also on target with its nearly perfect print quality. The initial purchase price is high, but over the long haul its superlow cost per page will save you money.

The 5130cdn is the fastest printer we've tested to date by a significant margin. On plain paper, it printed text at a rapid clip of 25.2 pages per minute (ppm). Graphics speeds ranged from 8.3 ppm for simpler graphics to 3.2 ppm for high-quality photo printing. On the Mac, using its PostScript driver, the 5130cdn was slightly less speedy: Printing plain text, it averaged 22.5 ppm, while on graphics it averaged 3.1 ppm. On both PCs and Mac, the print quality was the same. Text quality was black and crisp. Overall color quality was very good, with natural colorings and some light graininess, which was more pronounced in grayscale graphics."