Pros & Cons
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- Reasonably fast.
- Prints directly from cameras and memory cards.
- Prints, copies, scans.
- Scans to PC's e-mail program.
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- Subpar text quality.
- Relatively low photo quality for an ink jet.
Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 926 Specs
| Color or Monochrome | 4-pass color |
| Connection Type | USB |
| Cost Per Page (Color) | 12.6 cents |
| Maximum Scan Area | 8.5" x 11" |
| Maximum Standard Paper Size | Legal |
| Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) | 3000 pages per month |
| Number of Ink Colors | 6 |
| Scanner Optical Resolution | 1200 pixels per inch |
| Scanner Type | Flatbed |
| Standalone Copier and Fax | Copier |
| Type | All-in-one |
Each year's new crop of printers is faster, with higher-quality output, more features, and/or at a lower price than those of the year before—right? Well, the Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 926 ($99 direct) largely bucks this trend. It's slower than the
Dell targets the 926 at home and light-duty home office needs, which also makes it a good choice for a college dorm. It can copy, scan, and print directly from PictBridge cameras as well as from memory cards; it can scan to e-mail by opening a new e-mail message on your PC and attaching the scan as a file; and it even offers minimal fax support, if you have a fax modem, with an option to scan to its own fax utility on your PC and send the scan as a fax.
Unfortunately, there's no automatic document feeder, so you have to scan multipage documents one page at a time. This limits the 926's usefulness for even a home office. On the plus side, you can add an 802.11g wireless network adapter ($99 direct), or a Bluetooth option ($36 direct), for printing from Bluetooth phones and other devices.
Setup is typical for an ink jet AIO. Find a spot for the 7.2- by 17.4- by 21.2-inch (HWD) AIO, remove the packing materials, load the two ink cartridges and paper, run the automated installation program from disc, connect the USB cable when the program tells you to, and you're ready to print.
Print speed counts as a plus overall. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), the 926 took a total of 20 minutes 49 seconds. That's about a minute slower than the 924, but it's still relatively fast for the price. Hewlett Packard's slightly less expensive
Alas, the 926 stumbles on output quality, particularly for text, which is far below par even for an ink jet. No fonts in our test suite qualified as easily readable with well formed characters at 4 or 5 points. One qualified at 6 points, most needed 10 points, and one stylized font with thick strokes needed 26 points. This doesn't mean the text was unreadable at smaller sizes, but it was visibly flawed, with broken lines, filled-in loops in lowercase e's, varying line thickness, and other issues, depending on the size and font.
Graphics and photo output were much more respectable. The quality of both was well within the range in which most ink jet–based AIOs fall, although they were on the low side. I saw some obvious banding and dithering in graphics, along with a tendency for thin lines to disappear, but the quality was good enough for internal business use, such as for printing PowerPoint slides as handouts.
The situation with photos is more complicated, since you can swap out the black cartridge for a photo cartridge to print with six colors instead of four. I tried it both ways and found that most photos actually looked worse using six-color printing. They also print a little slower, which is typical for ink jets, averaging 2:38 for a 4-by-6 and 5:43 for an 8-by-10.
Based on the four-color output, more than half the photos in our test suite qualified as true photo quality, despite some visible dithering in the form of graininess. The photos that fell just short suffered from mild posterization (in the form of a loss of subtle shading that made them look painted instead of photographed) and a tendency for similar colors to look the same (as with a fruit bowl in one photo, with an orange and grapefruit merging into each other). A monochrome photo also showed a distinct tint.
Count the output as good enough for snapshots, but not consistently good enough for storing cherished memories. The good news is that the photos that print at true photo quality should last a long time, thanks to a claimed 100-year lifetime in dark storage, as in an album, and reasonably good water and smudge resistance. Drops of water left to dry will leave water stains, but you can safely pass the photos around to look at without worrying about them coming back smudged from someone's moist hands.
Although in many ways the Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 926 is not an improvement over its predecessor, it's still reasonably fast, its prints should last a while, and it has added memory-card slots. Unless you must have high-quality text, the 926 is a more than reasonable choice for an AIO for school, home, or light-duty use in a home office.
See how the Dell Photo All-In-One Printer 926 stacks up against the competition in our
Benchmark Test Results
Click here to view the
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