The Dell 7130cdn Color Printer ($2,799.99 direct) is one of a small group of printers designed to provide up to tabloid-sized color output to high-volume workgroups. It's relatively fast, and produces solid output, with above-par photos. But it's a near clone of another printer that offers even better photo quality and superb graphics, plus a unique and compelling extra that the 7130cdn lacks, albeit at a higher price.

Design and Features
Many Dell printers are rebranded, slightly changed versions of Lexmark or Xerox machines; the 7130cdn is essentially the same printer as the Editors' Choice Xerox Phaser 7500/DN ($3,299.99 direct, 4.5 stars). They're both LED-based printers, using LEDs instead of lasers as the light source. LED printers are considered laser class, and are similar to lasers in speed and output characteristics.

One thing the Dell lacks, though, is Xerox's natural language software color control, one of our favorite features from the Xerox 7500/DN. Accessible through the printer's drivers, it lets people with no technical knowledge of color mixing easily tweak colors from print to print by using a series of drop-down menus, with commands such as "green colors slightly more green." In the 7130cdn, you have to resort to more conventional color control, such as the use of sliders to alter lightness, contrast, saturation, and color balance for reds, greens, and blues. (At least the PostScript driver that comes with the 7130cdn gives you slider control; the PCL driver offers no color correction.)

The 7130cdn is one printer you don't want to share your desk with. At 25.2 by 26.2 inches, its footprint is so large that during its time on our test bench I came to think of it as "bigfoot." Its 15.7-inch height is more modest, so it shouldn't be scraping the shelf above it. You'll want at least two people to move it into place, as it tips the scales at 145 pounds (which actually is relatively light for a tabloid-size laser-class printer).

It has a standard paper capacity of 600 sheets, split between a 500-sheet main tray and a 100-sheet multipurpose feeder, which folds out from the left side of the machine. The main tray holds paper up to tabloid size (11 by 17 inches), while the multipurpose tray can feed paper at sizes up to 12.6 by 47.2 inch banners. Up to 3 additional 500-sheet trays ($499 each, direct) or a 1,500-sheet drawer ($1,199 direct) are available as options, as is a stand for the printer ($399 direct).

The 7130cdn's claimed cost per printed page of 1.7 cents per monochrome page and 9.3 cents per color page is competitive, though ink costs rise dramatically if you buy standard-yield cartridges rather than the high-capacity ones on which those rates are based.

The 7130cdn offers Ethernet and USB connectivity. We tested it over an Ethernet connection with a PC running Windows Vista.

Print Speed and Output Quality
Dell rates the 7130cdn at 35 (letter-sized) pages per minute for monochrome printing and 30 for color; the rated speeds are based on text printing only. I tested it at 8.3 effective pages per minute (ppm) on the latest version of our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), which combines text pages, graphics pages, and pages with mixed content. We clocked the Xerox 7500/DN at 7.1 ppm, and the Canon Pixma IX7000 ($399 direct, 4 stars) at 2.8 ppm. The Canon IX7000 is our Editors' Choice budget tabloid-size color printer; as it's an inkjet, we didn't expect it to be competitive in speed with the laser-class 7130cdn. The Canon IX7000 was also designed for smaller offices, with a 12,500-page monthly duty cycle while the 130cdn's duty cycle is up to 150,000 pages.

Output quality was solid across the board, with photos a little above par for a color laser-class printer and text and graphics within the average range. Fortunately, average text quality for a laser is very good, fine for any standard business need but short of the quality you'd want for things like desktop publishing work that requires very small fonts.

Graphics quality was par for a color laser, good enough for normal business needs up to and including PowerPoint handouts. Issues included posterization (abrupt changes in color where they should be gradual), mild banding (a pattern of thin lines of discoloration), and mis-registration (alignment issues between zones of different colors).

Photo quality was slightly above par, with most photos able to pass as true photo quality when held at arm's length. A monochrome print showed poor contrast, and a color print was on the pale side, but by and large colors were well saturated and color fidelity was good. Prints showed dithering (graininess); in two cases it was apparent at arm's length but for the most part you had to look closely. The 7130cdn's photo quality is good enough for printing out client newsletters or for basic marketing handouts.

The Dell 7130cdn Color Printer costs less than the Xerox Phaser 7500/DN and is slightly faster. Although the 7130cdn prints above-average photos, the Xerox 7500/DN's photo and graphics quality are both top tier for laser-class printers—and only the Xerox 7500/DN has natural-language color control. For an office with only an occasional need for tabloid-size color printing, the Canon Pixma IX7000 provides good text and graphics quality at a small fraction of the 7130cdn's price, though at a much slower speed.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
Check out the test scores for the Dell 7130cdn Color Printer.

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Dell 7130cdn Color Printer with several other laser printers side by side.

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