Review: Dell 1250c Colour LED Printer

Dell's 1250c laser-class colour printer. Photo / Supplied

If someone had've told me a few years ago that I'd be able to buy a colour 'laser class' printer for a shade over $500, I'd have laughed them out of the room.

Meanwhile, Dell must've heard my cackles as its just launched the 1250c a colour LED-powered printer for the not too shabby sum of $549, which not only appeases my inner bean counter geek, but also makes it a real contender against similarly-priced inkjets for anyone wanting to knock out high quality documents.

Where laser printers use a costly (and tricky to engineer) array of lenses and mirrors and a laser to scan an image onto the printer's toner drum, LED printers feature a far simpler design with less moving parts which typically translates into cheaper manufacturing costs and improved reliability, hence the 1250c's sharp sticker price.

Un-boxing the Dell 1250c colour printer revealed a compact black box. Cubist aesthetics aside, the 1250c is a fairly straightforward animal, and like most office laser printers, features an output tray on its top and a paper try cartridge in its base. Able to hold 150 sheets of A4 or letter sized paper in its input tray, Dell's specs claim the 1250c is rated to output up to 30,000 pages per month, which should be more than plenty for most small businesses.

Getting set up proved to be a relatively quick and painless affair, and my only grizzle here being that old bugbear of mine - no cables were included.

For many buyers is likely to result in a frustrating trip back to the computer store. Come on Dell (and other manufacturers) - cables only cost a few bucks, so why not include one in the box?

Print quality and speed

Having finished hyperventilating over the lack of included cables, I set about getting the printer set up and zapped out a set of obligatory test prints. The results didn't disappoint. monochrome output with both images and text were clean and crisp (even fonts as small as 4pt remained readable). Colour output was free of bleeding and banding, with colours remaining evenly distributed across all images. In short, the 1250c did a near perfect job of knocking out slick and professional-looking documents that'd be more than up to the needs of most business (and consumers).

Its output may have been great, but the 1250c isn't going to break any speed records soon. The specs rated the 1250c at 12 pages per minute (PPM) for monochrome and 10 pages per minute with colour. Under real world conditions, this translated into it spitting out pages just shy of 8PPM for mono and just over 6PPM for colour. Sure, there are faster printers out there - but like most people, I'm not too concerned about waiting a few seconds for pages to pop out of a printer, especially when I'm getting colour laser quality print at a wallet pleasing price.

Bang per buck

Staying on the fiscal side of things, one of the lesser known facts about buying printers is that their real cost doesn't come from the printers actual purchase price, but from what you're likely to spend over the life of the printer on toner or ink cartridges. Black cartridges that'll last for around 700 pages cost just over $112 whilst high yield Black toner cartridges can be had for just over $127 (they're rated for 1400 pages assuming 5 per cent toner coverage). Doing some basic maths, this translates into an ongoing cost of just over $0.09 per mono page and slightly more for colour pages, which all told is average to good for a colour laser.

Verdict

The 1250c is a very affordable printer that manages to balance price with print quality, doing a decent job of cranking out colour documents. The big drawcard is most likely to be the $549 sicker price which is sufficiently cheap to make it a solid purchasing alternative to inkjet printers. This aside, about the only two real flies in the Dell ointment are the lack of bundled cables (not a show stopper) and slow-ish print speeds. As neither of these issues are particularly dire for small business owners wanting durable colour output, Dell's 1250c is pretty hard to go past as a business printing choice.

Dell 1250c LED colour printer
$549

Tech specs
Dimensions: 394x300x225mm (w/d/h)
10.5 kg
Print Speed:Up to 12 ppm mono and up to 10 ppm colour A4 (claimed)
Duty Cycle: Up to 30,000 pages per month
Maximum input 150-sheets
CPU/Memory: 192 MHz/64MB
Connectivity: USB 2.0