Sections
- Page 1 Dell C2660dn Review
- Page 2 Performance and Verdict Review
- Page 3 Print Speeds and Costs Table Review
Dell C2660dn – Print Speeds
Dell claims a top speed of 27ppm for the C2660dn and we got somewhere near with our 20-page mono text test, which gave 21.8ppm. A more reasonable expectation for shorter documents would be around 14.3ppm, which is what we saw on our five-page mono test.
There’s no draft or toner-save mode offered by the printer’s driver, but the five-page mono text and colour graphics test gave a slightly faster speed of 15.0ppm. The duplex speed also holds up well, and we saw 16.0 sides per minute on our 20-side test job. A 15 x 10cm colour photo printed on A4 took just 10s to print.
This all assumes that the machine is warmed up and ready to print. It takes 20s for the printer to warm up from sleep mode and start printing, which forms the bulk of the 24s of a single-page print.
Dell C2660dn – Print Quality and Costs
The print quality is very good, with sharp, detailed black text print, good solid colours with no dither patterns and well registered black text over solid colour. Business graphics are bright and attention-grabbing and even photos, often a problem with colour laser print, look smooth and reasonably natural.
When you take into account all the different consumables this machine will need in a typical service life of 100,000 pages, you come up with page costs of 3.4p for a mono page and 15.1p for a colour one. Both of these figures are dear, with the colour figure particularly high.
Should I buy a Dell C2660dn?
When you compare the running costs of this printer with, for example, the £238 https://www.trustedreviews.com/brother-hl-l8250cdn_Printer_review Brother HL- L8250CDN, which we calculated at 2.5p for a mono page and 10.7p for a colour one, you can see why the Dell machine looks expensive.
Since the Brother is also faster in most areas, with the exception of duplex print, and offers a front panel socket for printing from USB drives, the Dell machine doesn’t look particularly good value.
Verdict
The Dell C2660dn is a robust, colour, office laser printer, with a good duty cycle and high quality print. It’s not that cheap to run, though, and has a number of different consumables to be considered at different usage rates. It’s comparatively quiet, though, and despite its large footprint, could make a very serviceable addition to a networked office.
Print test results overpage.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.