Dell 1230C printer reviews – a super-cheap color laser printer

Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 4:31
Gadgets
421 views
View Comments

dell-1230c The new color printer launched by Dell, the 1230c Color Laser Printer is an extremely inexpensive and extremely small printer. The printer has a decent printing speed. The 1230c’s plain-text printing speed of 16.9 pages per minute is pretty decent speed talking of any color laser printer. The printer’s top graphics speed is 2.4 pages per minute, which is again quite decent. If you thought that the speed is reliable, wait till you hear about the print quality. The print quality offered by this printer is disappointing. The simple image output from the printer often shows distracting background patterns commonly known as moiré. More complex graphics like photos suffer even more and are usually mottled.

As far as the design of the printer is concerned, you will not be too impressed. With an inscrutable control panel and cluster of LEDs with confusing labeling, the printer mixes it all up. These LEDs flash in combinations that can be understood only through the documentation. The documentation is also quite unclear. Two adjacent LEDs, both called the Status LED, blink slowly and quickly alternatively and can confuse you during your print job. This is made even more complicated if other LEDs join in. The primary ‘stop’ or ‘cancel’ button on the printer also sometimes functions as “continue” or “go.” The printer’s input tray takes 150 sheets of plain paper. If you want to accommodate large size papers, then the tray sticks out the front more.

The panel above the 100-sheet top output tray opens up the paper path in case of a jam. As the features, Dell claims that space constraints resulted in this kind of a shelf. The shelf boasts of a shiny, textured surface to prevent scratches on it. The printer is provided with one 1000-page black (K) cartridge, and 700-page cyan (C), magenta (M), and yellow (Y) cartridges. The 1000-page color cartridge costs $50 and a page with all four colors would cost 19 cents. This shows that the printer offers an expensive toner pricing. The Dell’s 1230c laser printer is no doubt very cheap but is best suited for home-office use at low volume, and not for complex, high volume printing jobs.