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 Printhead 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. I 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.

I timed the 1320c at a total of 12 minutes 57 seconds on our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software. That's noticeably faster than the 18:53 total for the HP Color LaserJet 1600 our current Editors' Choice for low-cost color lasers, but it's slower than the Oki Printing Solutions C3400n which took 10:44. Given the issue with the color mode setting, it's worth mention that both our 50-page monochrome and 50-page color text files printed from Microsoft Word at the same speed—just under 12 ppm. Even at this slower speed for black-and-white, however, the 1320c offers reasonably fast performance.

The printer's output quality is a strong point overall. Text quality is a touch below the norm for lasers. Still, that's good enough to print easily readable text with well-formed characters at 4 points for some fonts in our test suite and 5 points for more than half of the fonts. One heavily stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points for easy readability, but unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, the 1320c should be able to handle anything you need to print.

I saw some minor to moderate flaws in graphics output, most notably dithering in the form of small patterns in what should be solid colors. More important, there were no major flaws, and the output is easily good enough for any internal business need, including, for example, PowerPoint handouts. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider it good enough for reports or similar output intended for an important client.

Photos are of higher quality than most lasers can manage. I saw some jagged edges on various objects, including the rounded edge of a piece of fruit, and a tendency for thin lines, including the strings in a tennis racket, to break up, but I noticed these issues only when I took a close look. Most of the photos looked good enough to qualify as near photo quality. They're certainly adequate for things such as client newsletters, and more than good enough for business tasks like printing Web pages with photos.

The 1320c is a little short on options. If you want to connect to a network, you can add Ethernet ($50 direct), but that's about it. Paper handling is limited to the default 250-sheet tray. That's obviously limiting if you need more, but it should be enough for most personal or small-office needs. Count the 1320c as a capable printer and a more than reasonable choice for a small-office or personal color laser.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the Dell Color Laser Printer 1320c's test scores.