Laser Printers

Dell, the PC giants had jumped in to the printer industry in the year 2003. The P1500 is one of the trio of the dell branded and Lexmark manufactured models. We have a mixed review about this product, it is neither outstanding nor very bad.

Bulky body:

It is very hefty weighing 20 pounds and having dimensions as, 14.2″ x 8.7″ x 15″. Regarding the colour, it comes in two tones similar to Dell’s notebooks. Once you look at it, it speaks for itself that it is a product of Dell. The Dell P1500 Personal Laser Printer is having a simple design that is given to make it a printer especially for personal and small office uses. Similar to some of the other office printers, P1500 does not have a LCD on its control panel.

The control panel:

The front of the Dell Laser Printer has two major control buttons and five different LEDs that indicate the status of the printer. The status options include readiness, status of the ink, status of the paper, paper jams if any and errors. All these indications are very useful especially for the purpose of troubleshooting. The input and output tray are on the top of the printer and both of them can be retracted in order to save space. The front of the printer doubles as a secondary manual feed output tray.

Installation:

The set-up poster is clear and well illustrated. Once you go through it, it will not cost you more than five minutes to plug in and install the machine. The printer can be connected to your PC via either parallel or USB ports which gives you better speed, but both of these cables are not provided by Dell along with the printer which is certainly a horrible omission. So, you will have to buy one before you can actually use the machine.

Dell’s detailed owner manual is of great help if you are a first time user of the printer as its eighty pages are full of useful and easy to understand instructions.

Compatibility:

One awful fact is that Dell P1500 Colour Laser Printer works only with windows 98 and latter versions and not with Mac. The dell P1500 outputs black and white texts at 600x600dpi as is the case of many other printers in the SOHO category.

The input tray and cartridge:

The input tray capacity is 150 sheets of plain paper and the other medias that this Dell P1500 laser printer support are transparencies, envelops, card stock, and paper labels of various sizes, up to the size A4.  In order to meet heavy printing demands, dell provides an additional attachable intake tray that has a capacity of a massive 250 sheets of plain paper.

Features:

The printer has an internal memory of 16MB which is upgradable to upto 144MB. The 200MHz processor used by P1500 adds buffer space and powers for heavy print loads. There are various print quality settings and functions available for you which includes font, watermark, and overlay management. The usage of the ink can be controlled by choosing between 10 levels of darkness. You can also opt for different effects like image smoothing or even a negative page for graphing. The print style options include Normal, Poster and booklet.

Performance:

Dell P1500 Laser Colour Printer has an average printing speed. It prints around 13 pages per minute while printing text but while printing graphics, it was a pitiful eight pages per minute. The quality was inconsistent as certain texts were solid and clear, some were broken and italics looked jagged and the ink saturation was poor too. Text and graphics prints had severe banding, inconsistent gradients and jaggy shapes. But all these are not much visible when you look at it casually. It is certainly good enough for most of the purposes producing distinct narrow lines.

Dell P1500 Laser Printer – Technical Specifications, Features

Other Laser Printers

• Brother HL-5040 Laser Printer
• Dell 3130cn Colour Laser Printer Review
• Samsung ML-1640 Mono Laser Printer Review
• Lexmark T640N Mono Laser Printer
• HP LaserJet 1300 Monochrome Laser Printer