Dell 1320c

Color lasers in this price range tend to be a good fit for a home office, a small office, or as a personal printer in a larger office. The 1320c is no exception. At 37.8 pounds, it's relatively light for a color laser.

It's also small enough, at 14.8 by 15.6 by 16.6 inches (HWD), that finding room for it shouldn't be hard, although it's bigger than what I'd want sitting on my desk.

Setup is typical for a sub $500 laser in most ways : Find a place for the printer, remove the packing materials, load the paper, plug in the USB cable and power cord, and install the software. Removing the packing materials is more involved than usual, however.

As with most inexpensive color lasers, the toner cartridges for the 1320c ship in place, inside the printer.

As with many but not all, you have to remove each cartridge, prepare it, and then snap it back into place.

An unusual twist is that you also have to remove something that Dell calls the Print head Device Unit (PDU), pull eight restraining ribbons from it, and then reinsert it into the printer.

To remove the PDU, you have to open the front cover so it lies flat, with the printer's transfer belt exposed in the cover.

You then have to pull the relatively heavy PDU out of the printer, remove the ribbons, and reinsert it, moving it over the belt both on the way out and on the way in. It was a little wary of the arrangement, with the belt so exposed to possible damage.

But as Dell points out, the PDU is good for 20,000 pages, so most people will have to do this only once, or perhaps twice, over the lifetime of the printer. More important, if you manage to damage the belt badly enough during initial setup to cause a problem, it's fully covered by warranty. Dell says it will swap out the damaged printer for a new one.

Dell rates the 1320c engine at 16 pages per minute for black and white and 12 ppm for color. Unless you set the driver for monochrome mode, however, it will always print in color mode even if you're printing black and white text.

As a practical matter, unless you're willing to confirm the driver setting each time you print, the rating is effectively 12 ppm. Since I wouldn't expect most people to bother switching back and forth, I used the default color mode setting for all of my tests.