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Image Courtesy of Dell Inc.

The Dell Laser Printer 1710 is no shrinking violet.  Designed for the home or small office user, this printer has a solid and permanent appearance, emphasised by its 396 x 355 x 247mm (W x D x H) dimensions, giving you the reassuring feeling that this piece of kit should be able to cope with whatever printing tasks you aim in its direction.  Fortunately, as with all Dell kit, the printer is delivered to your front door as I would not fancy lugging its 10.2kg any length of distance with my back problems.

Setting up this two-tone silver and black unit is relatively straightforward as you clear away the various protective materials.  Removing the toner cartridge, to facilitate this process, does require you to lift it slightly before pulling it out - a fact not mentioned on the "Setting Up Your Printer" poster.  Options are available for either parallel or USB connectivity with you supplying the lead in either case.

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As standard the printer comes with a paper drawer that can hold up to 250 sheets with standard output appearing on the top of the unit.  An optional 550 sheet paper drawer is available to bring total capacity up to 800 sheets.  A manual feed route is positioned just above the main paper drawer for use with thicker paper, card and envelopes.  This feed path is straight through to the rear of the printer to ensure there are no problems with paper curl.

Alongside the main paper output bin is the operator panel consisting of two buttons and a series of LED status lights.  These two buttons can be used to continue and cancel activity.  An on/off switch is located at the rear of the printer while a power-saving timer option can be implemented from the supplied Settings software utility.

This utility provides the means to adjust various settings related to paper, quality and print options.  You can switch between portrait and landscape orientation plus opt for double-sided printing.  The 1710 also supports booklet printing and multipage printing whereby a user-defined number of pages can be reduced and printed on a single sheet of paper.

Powered by a 366MHz ARM9 processor, the printer comes with 16MB of memory, upgradeable to 144MB, as standard.  Print resolution is a choice between 600 x 600 and 1200 x 1200 with settings for draft, normal and best quality.  Both PCL 5e and PCLB print languages are built-in and you also get 17 scaleable and 2 bitmap PCI fonts.

Around 40 seconds is required for the printer to warm up from a cold start.  Dell claims a print speed of up to 26 A4 papers per minute for the 1710.  My tests revealed slightly lower figures.  In draft mode I was achieving 25ppm while normal mode produced 24ppm.  Switching to the best print mode reduced this figure to 13ppm.  To the naked eye, there was only a slight darkening of the text to distinguish between best and draft or normal mode.  All the different modes produced print quality that would be fine for most eventualities while noise levels were perfectly acceptable.

At the time of writing, the Dell Laser Printer 1710 is on special offer with its price reduced from £147 to £120.  With its print speed, good quality output and range of supported paper sizes, this is a product that could be just what you are looking for to carry out your printing needs especially if you are running a small business.  Replacement toner cartridges are available at £64.63 for a 3000 page yield of £81.08 for 6000 page yield.  The printer requires Windows 98SE or later, Mac 9.2 or various Linux flavours.

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/print_1710?c=uk&cs=ukepp1&l=en&s=dhs