Dell 1235cn colour laser printer

As far as laser printers go, the Dell 1235cn is certainly one of the more attractive, with an all-black chassis and smooth, curved edges. It's a colour multi-function laser, and is therefore able to print, scan, copy and send faxes.

USB is joined by built-in Ethernet, so the 1235cn will have no problem hooking up to a corporate network. But with a 150-sheet input tray and woefully small 80-sheet output tray, it's certainly not a printer that would suit large or even medium-sized workgroups.

In our tests, mono prints arrived at a rate of 16ppm, with the first page appearing in around 11 seconds. Since it's a multi-pass model, colour prints are much slower at just over 3ppm.

An automatic document feeder sits on top of the scanner unit, but it's only able to take 15 pages at a time so will be no good for large photocopying tasks. It is, however, fairly nippy, and copying a six-sheet document took 38 seconds.

In terms of print quality, the 1235cn performs adequately. We've certainly no problem with its mono output, but some lighter colours struggled in terms of vibrancy. That said, for printing presentations and the like it's fine.

Although reasonably quiet, we noticed the 1235cn kicks out a fair bit of heat during use. Each page arriving in the output tray is joined by a waft of hot air, and if you print a large document in a small, poorly ventilated room, temperatures will soon start to rise.

Compared to other lasers, the 1235cn is expensive to run. All replacement toner cartridges cost £41 (ex VAT), with the black lasting 1,500 pages and each of the three colour cartridges good for 1,000 pages. This means colour prints cost a hefty 15p each, while mono prints are 2.7p. To make matters worse, Dell doesn't offer high-capacity toner cartridges, so there's no opportunity to reduce these costs.

We've no complaints regarding the features offered by Dell's 1235cn, but its high running costs and slow colour printing makes it best suited as a single-user printer or for small workgroups where large print jobs are very infrequent.