Dell 5350dn

The Dell 5230dn is a black & white laser printer designed for large workloads (maximum monthly cycle of 225,000 pages) in a business setting. It's designed to optimise workgroup productivity with super-fast speeds and low printing costs. It also promises pro quality, simple configuration and intuitive use. Let's see what it can do!

Hardware

This printer has a plain, boxy, rather basic design that's verging on austere, but behind this robust exterior lies a standard printer with capacities you'll be able to extend. Its 128 MB memory, enough to service a workgroup of twenty people, can be extended to a maximum of 640 MB. It has Ethernet connectivity and also supports PCL and PS print languages.

Navigation is simple and the screen displays the actions required, such as 'paper jam, remove sheet'.

     The front of the Dell 5350dn

The paper loader can hold 550 pages as standard.

You can scale capacities up to suit your needs, with Dell supplying accessories such as an envelope feeder, a mailbox tray, a 1850 page sheet stacker tray, a high capacity loader of 2000 pages, a 550 sheet drawer and a 550 sheet extender tray.
 

 

Speed

Here’s a printer that's obviously been designed for top-speed printing. The tech specs promise 48 pages per minute but we measured it at 50! Nevertheless, the 5350dn doesn’t get a five-star rating in this section because it takes a bit too long to get going (see inset).

Its print speeds do make the Dell 5350dn one of the fastest printers we've tested, and while it obviously slows down when printing double-sided pages, at 21 ppm, the duplex mode is still very respectable.

Quality

Black & white print quality is very good. For text alone, the 5350dn does perfectly. The only slight fault, which meant we couldn’t give it a five-star rating here either, is that letters and characters could do with having a bit more depth and the contours lack a little precision on our test graph.


Our score in this category is based on standard print quality, which here is a resolution of 600 x 600 dpi. When you switch to high-quality mode, however, the resolution is doubled and the difference is very visible, on curves most of all. Lines are finer and the results better overall.

Energy consumption & Noise levels

Large as it is, this printer doesn’t use too much power. The values measured (11 W on standby and 300 W when printing) are on the right side of average for laser printers, making this a low-consumption machine. It is, however, noisier than average, and at 54 dB(A), it won’t go unnoticed. To put this in the current context, printers that break the 50 dB(A) barrier are no longer considered to be quiet.

Cost per page: 1.5 pence

Dell apparently plans to stop producing the very high capacity 30,000-page cartridges (though you will still find some on sale), leaving us with the standard 7,000-page cartridges. You’ll get 7,000 pages from the starter cartridge too.

There are two prices depending on whether you go for the ‘use and return’ option or not. ‘Use and return’ cartridges must be returned to Dell when empty in exchange for a reduced bill. This is a nice idea that offers users a greener and more economical solution!

Costs per page vary between around 0.7 and 2 pence per page depending on the option you go for. This makes the 5320dn one of the lowest-cost printers we've tested.

ISO lifespan for text

High capacity ISO lifespan for text

Cartridge	Price	ISO lifespan	Cost per page
Black	£254	30,000	0.8 pence
Black "use and return" option	£212	30,000	0.7 pence