Hey, promotional images are promotional, right?

If you read through this blog, you'll notice that I do a lot of campaigns for the W.O.M.M company BzzAgent.  Lately, I was offered the chance to purchase a printer from Dell at a steeply discounted rate in order to review and promote it.

I was excited, because I had been shopping for a printer lately.  I'd recently come to the conclusion that my life would be 110% better if I had an at-home color laser printer.  There's not any real justification for this conclusion, though.  However, I don't need justification.  Instant gratification works just fine in its place.
I was given a list of printers to choose from, and I ended up selecting the  Dell 1250c Color Capable LED Printer.

Wait, LED?  Didn't I say it was a laser printer? 

LED printers inhabit a world that marketers refer to as laser class.  Some websites and vendors will refer to LED printers as laser printers.  For the average end user, there is little visible difference in the output.  A true laser printer has a higher DPI that an LED printer.  Also, no one can seem to make up their mind if the mechanics of an LED printer's stationary LEDs causes it to have a higher life expectancy than an laser printer or not. 

A laser printer works by using a negatively charged laser to draw your image on a positively charged, revolving drum.  As this drum revolves, it attracts toner powder from the cartridge, which is then transferred to the paper.  An LED printer works by drawing the image with little blinking lights that are studded all over the drum.  Here, the drum is completely stationary.  On one hand you have a printer that doesn't have nearly as many moving parts.  On the other, the non-moving parts still have to blink.

Because the drum is covered with LEDs, you can only have a DPI that equals the number of LEDs on the drum.  A laser printer doesn't have this issue.  If I'm remembering correctly, this printer has a maximum DPI of 600 x 600.  As a reference, an old dot matrix printer typically had a DPI of around 60.  So what does this mean to the average family user?  Nothing, really.  Truthfully, for the average family, this is kind of irrelevant.  This resolution is absolutely perfect for small office and family printing. 

The quality of the printing is pretty good, but it gets kinda iffy when doing teeny-tiny fonts.  As far as graphical quality goes, what I've seen has been pretty good.  I don't think I would want to make art gallery prints with it, though.  I've not printed out anything on photo paper yet, so I'm not able to give an opinion on how well it does with this medium.  I did have an instance where the resolution was kinda crappy.  I'm not sure what caused this, or how to replicate (or prevent) it.  I also had a paperjam that was a nightmare to untangle.

Print speed is pretty good.  Dell clocks it in at around 10 PPM when printing black and white text.  For a personal printer, this is actually fairly fast.  It may not seem fast, but it is.  PC Magazine, who gave it a 2011 Editor's Choice Award, rates it up there with some fancy laser printers.

However, it's paper handling abilities are kind of wimpy if you do any bulk printing.  It does have a by-pass tray, but its main feeder can only handle 150-ish sheets.  To put that in perspective, a pack of paper from the store generally has 500 sheets in it.  Nothing makes me madder than blank copy paper running loose all over my floor.

While I found Dell's prices for the printer to be on par with prices elsewhere, I found the toner cartridges to be kinda pricey.  I can't recommend buying them for there; not with Sam's Club having them for almost half the price.  Even so, the price of ink (or in this case, toner) is substantially cheaper than if you were to buy a cheap-o ink jet.  A printer's real cost comes out in the price of ink, with black ink running somewhere around $5000 a gallon (as figured by buying it as packaged in stores). 

All-in-all, this is a fantastic printer for home or small office use.  It's not a printer that could withstand commercial or heavy-duty printing, but most households don't require something that heavy.