Dell C3760dn Color Laser Printer

The Dell C3760dn Color Laser Printer has a lot to recommend it: it is fast, prints good graphics, and has a high standard paper capacity and a low cost per page, particularly for monochrome printing. Other printers have better overall output quality, but the C3760dn provides a good mix of speed, graphics quality, features, and low running costs. It's well worth consideration if you're looking for a workhorse color printer for a medium to large workgroup.

The all-black C3760dn is of typical size for a workgroup printer of its class; it measures14.9 by 17.2 by 19.1 inches (HWD) and weighs 56 pounds. It has a 4-line monochrome LED screen, sandwiched between an alphanumeric keypad plus 4-way controller and a port for a USB thumb drive. The C3760dn supports password-protected printing; an optional hard drive is available.

It has a generous standard paper capacity of 700 sheets, split between a 550-sheet main tray and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray; an optional 550-sheet tray boosts the maximum paper capacity to 1,250 sheets. It has an automatic duplexer for printing on both sides of a sheet of paper.

The C3760dn comes with both standard and PostScript drivers. It offers USB and Ethernet (including Gigabit) connectivity; wireless is optional. I tested it over an Ethernet connection with drivers installed on a PC running Windows Vista.

Printing Speed
The C3760dn is one of a small but growing number of laser printers to ship with duplex (two-sided) printing as the default. (We've also seen Canon and Xerox printers similarly set.) This helps users save paper when they don't need to print single-sided documents. Although this is both cost-effective and ecologically sound, generally speeds for duplex printing are somewhat slower for the same number of pages input, as the printer has to turn each printed sheet over. As we do our business applications testing using default settings, as we've found that most users tend to stick to them, we did our official speed tests of this printer in duplex mode.

On our business applications suite, (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software), I timed the C3760dn at an effective 7.9 pages per minute (ppm) a fast speed and very good for its 23 page per minute rating for both color and monochrome printing that?s based on printing text documents without graphics or photos?our test suite includes text pages, graphics pages, and pages with mixed content. Although it was outdone by the Editors' Choice HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 Color Printer M551DN, which tested at 9 ppm, when I switched the C3760dn to simplex printing they were effectively tied. The OKI C610dn tested at 7.2 ppm, while the Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 6280DN crept in at 4.5ppm.

The C3760dn's cost per printed page, including toner and other consumables, is 1.5 cents per monochrome page and 10 cents per color page. Both figures are very good, matching the OKI C610dn's black and white costs and improving on its color costs of 10.9 cents per page. It also edges out the Editors' Choice HP LaserJet Enterprise Color Printer M551DN's 1.8 cents per page for monochrome while besting the HP M551DN's 13.9 cents per page.

Output Quality

The C3760dn's output was a mixed bag, with above-par graphics and slightly below-par text and photos. Text was still fine for general business use, except for situations requiring very small fonts.

Graphics quality was good. Some backgrounds were a bit blotchy, and there was some dithering (graininess) and posterization (the tendency for abrupt shifts in color rather than gradual), but these issues were fairly minor. Overall, the graphics were fine for PowerPoint handouts, even going to people you seek to impress, and good enough for at least basic marketing materials.

Photo quality varied greatly among our test prints; some looked fine at arm's length, while others showed issues such as mild banding (faint vertical striations), tinting, and loss of detail in bright areas. Though the prints are okay for in-house use, I'd be hesitant to use them for, say, a company newsletter.

Despite the C3760dn's good graphics, its overall output quality can't match that of the HP M551DN, which is suitable for printing a range of marketing materials. The Dell effectively matched the M551DN's print speed (when tested in simplex mode), has slightly greater paper capacity, lower running costs, and a lower sticker price. The Xerox Phaser 6280DN?which, although discontinued is still available from many e-tailers at a greatly reduced price?has even better output than the HP, but took nearly twice as long to print out our test suite.

If output quality is paramount, the Xerox 6280DN still rules the roost, though it lags in speed, paper capacity, and running costs. The HP M551DN has better overall output than the C3760dn, but the Dell has a slight edge in running costs and paper capacity. If graphics quality plus a good mix of high speed, abundant paper capacity, and low running costs are what you're seeking, the Dell C3760dn Color Laser Printer could well be your color laser printer of choice.

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