BIOS: Technology Means Business

The Laser Printer 1710n, priced at £199 (ex. VAT), features integrated networking (10/100Base-T Ethernet) so it's ideal for small workgroups who don't need colour. For £99 (ex. VAT) less, the Laser Printer 1710 drops the built-in NIC but still facilitates affordable personal printing for small- or home-office use.

The Midnight Grey-and-Ion Silver A4 printer sports an attractive rounded design, a very welcome feature considering most mono laser printers are beige and lacking in terms of cosmetic appeal. The printer is relatively speedy too, with a claimed print speed of up to 27ppm (pages-per-minute) at a native print resolution of 1200x1200dpi. The Laser Printer 1710n is relatively cheap to run too, with a cost-per-page as low as 1p using Dell's High-Capacity Toner Cartridge. The printer has life of around 120000 pages.

The Laser Printer 1710n has a maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 15000 pages and supports an optional 550-sheet paper drawer, providing a maximum capacity of 800 sheets (just 250 sheets are supported as standard). Automatic duplexing isn't supported, however, and there's no support for memory card, direct USB or PictBridge printing. There's no privacy printing options either, and you can't install a hard disk drive for large print jobs or printing fonts and logos. You can however, connect it to a single computer or network using either its parallel, USB or 10/100BaseTx Ethernet NIC.

The Laser Printer 1710n can be shared over a wired network out-of-the-box and comes with 32MB of standard memory (user upgradable to 160MB) and PostScript Level 3 support. For an additional £56.33 (ex. VAT), the printer can be wireless-enabled with Dell's 3300 Wireless Adapter. It also comes with Dell's excellent Printer Web Tool which makes installation, configuration and management easy. The Web-based management tool can even be set up to provide automatic e-mail notifications to alert you of low toner levels, paper shortage and paper jams. You can then order consumbles online directly from Dell.

Setting up, configuring and operating the Laser Printer 1710n is straightfoward. The operator panel on the topside of the printer has five lights and two jazzy silver buttons, allowing you to start and stop print jobs, as well as view the printer's status. For instance, there are LEDs to indicate the printer is ready, toner is low, the drum needs replacing, paper needs loading, there's a paper jam, or there's some other kind of error. In addition to the 250-sheet paper tray is a manual feeder located at the front of the printer. Similar to other printers you can only feed one sheet of print media at a time, but the slot is a convenient option to make quick runs of paper types or sizes that are not currently loaded in the paper tray. The main paper tray and manual feeder accommodates paper, labels, transparencies and envelopes from 76x127mm up to 216x356mm (60 to 90gsm).

The Drivers and Utilities CD-ROM that came with the printer comes with a combination of software applications, depending on your operating system. However, the software applications are not available with Linux or Macintosh, and Dell's Dell Toner Management System is not available with Windows 98SE or ME, or when the printer is connected locally to a computer. In addition, the Printing Status Window is not available with Windows NT, 98 SE, or ME, or when the printer is connected to a network. The Printing Status window displays the status of the printer (Ready, Offline, and Error) and the name of the job when you send a job to print. The Printing Status window also displays the level of toner.

There's also a Dell Printer Supplies Reorder Application (not supported with Windows 98SE or ME) which lets you order toner by phone or from the Web, and a Local Printer Settings Utility to change and save printer settings not available from the printer driver (for example, activating Alarm Control if you want the printer to sound an alarm when it needs attention). We also liked the Driver Profiler utility which lets you create driver profiles that contain custom driver settings. A driver profile can contain a group of saved printer driver settings and other data for things such as print orientation and N-Up (document settings), installation status of an output tray (printer options), user-defined paper sizes (custom papers), simple text and watermarks, overlay references, font references, and form associations.

Have you ever sent a print job to the network printer down the hall, only to find it didn't print because of a paper jam or an empty paper tray? One of the features of Dell's Printer Configuration Web Tool is the Email Alert Setup, which sends you, or the key operator, an e-mail when the printer needs supplies or intervention. If you fill out printer inventory reports requiring the asset tag number of all of the printers in your area, the Printer Configuration Web Tool has a Printer Information feature that makes it easy - just type the IP address of each printer on the network to display the asset tag number. It also lets you change printer settings and keep track of printing trends. If you are a network administrator, you can easily copy the printer's settings to one or all printers on the network right from your Web browser.

Print quality from the Laser Printer 1710n is more than acceptable for general business documents, as long as you don't rely heavily of graphic-heavy literature. Black text appeared deep and rich, and other characters were tight and well controlled. It's unlikely that you'll ever need to print text that the Laser Printer 1710n can't handle. The only downside is noticeable banding and dithering when printing photos. Having said that, it's unlikely you'll be printing your holiday snaps with this type of product. Still, the output is easily good enough for schoolwork or internal business use. [7.5]