Hi,

Good post - there are a lot of folks wondering about this printer. I received a 3100cn the other day and wanted to post a little bit about it:

The output in black and color is excellent. It is far more balanced than both the overcontrasted HP 4500 series and the washed out HP 2550 color lasers. (These are the only ones I have hands-on access to, and was able to compare prints of the same image). I admit that I did not tailor the photo image to any of the printers, which may have improved the quality on the HP models. The Dell was great out of the box.

The calibration cycle is brief, when it happens (it's done it once when new cartridges were installed and once after 50 or so color impressions). The startup and warmup times are short, and it's noiseless when not in use. These are huge plusses compared to other brands.

The 3100cn adds mac compatibility and postscript, and comes with an extra paper drawer, which adds to the height. If my colleagues didn't need the postscript publishing accuracy, and occasionally mac compatibility, I would have gone with the smaller 3000cn.

The color print speeds are much faster than I expected for in-document 1/4 page or smaller figures, (although full-page graphics take a more expected length of time), and like I mentioned, I believe the output quality is excellent for the price class.

Black printing is crisp and graphics are dithered appropriately for a 600dpi laser. It's also cheap to print black, as the cartridges are cheaper than standard laser printing (about 1 cent per page vs. 2-3 cents with many b/w lasers). You are best served by specifically installing a second print driver and forcibly disabling the color engine to get mixed text/graphic pages to print without uselessly rotating through all 4 cartridges, but if you do that the b/w printing is wonderfully fast.

To answer your other question, the 3000cn comes with a minimally filled set of color cartridges (1/4 full, or 1000 pages), and a 1/2 full black cartridge (2000 pages).
On the other hand, the 3100cn comes with all 4 cartridges completely full (4000 pages), which makes up for a lot of the price difference by itself.

I have just posted this above, but the extra paper tray that the 3100cn ships with (and is optional on the 3000cn) is non-removable in the sense that the printer will not start up without it under there. I cannot explain, nor even remotely fathom, why Dell would want to do this, but they have, and it's been the major dissapointment for a lot of my colleagues who are otherwise interested in this unit for home publishing. For the home, I would say the 3100 is too imposing unless you can mount it in a closet or hidden away somewhere. The 3000 would be plenty big by itself.

The other question people have asked me is about the MFT (multi-function tray) on both of these models. It's not a tray in the sense that the HP 2550L has one, which needs to be open all of the time. It's not a drawer, but letter-size paper will fit entirely within the tray and the door will close to conceal it. This is not clear in the Dell information on these units, which makes it look like the paper will stick halfway out the drawer.

Anyhow, besides the bizzare drawer issue, they're great printers.

Good luck to you!
-oncall

oncall247,

 

Thanks for the information on the 3100.

we really like ours.  Where do I find the second print driver that will do what you recommend with the black printing?  Sounds like a great option.  If one does use this second driver, do you just select a different printer if you want black only pages?

Thanks

 

Hi Jimhild,

Thanks for the message. It's not so much a separate driver as a second installation of the same driver with different options as default (and a different name). I wrote out a step-by-step in case you used the installation disk for the original install:

Go to the printer setup screen and rename the current driver to '3100cn Color' or something along those lines.

then go 'add new printer'.
Choose 'local printer', but *not* auto-detect.
Use the drop-box to select the correct USB port or IP address that the printer is installed onto (depending on if you've set it on a network or USB).
Choose the Dell 3100cn driver and install the printer (again). It will probably come up automatically - just click through the user prompts as normal.

Now that you have two drivers, rename the new one '3100cn Black' or BW or whatever you like. To make it exclusively black:
Right click on the BW one and choose properties.
Select Printing preferences > Paper/Quality > choose Black and White.
Now click on Advanced > Change 'output color' to Black (from Color).
Click Ok until you're back at the desktop.

So if you print from the '3100cn BW' driver you get that 25ppm black that they were talking about in the brochure, without having to set the configuration each time. Choosing the '3100cn color' will give you what you had before - 5ppm printing with all the cartridges.

Have fun!