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Dell B2360dn

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Dell B2360dn - Laser Printers
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Dell B2360dn's speed and paper handling make it a good fit as a shared monochrome laser printer for heavy-duty printing in a micro or small office or workgroup.
Best Deal£399.99

Buy It Now

£399.99

Pros & Cons

    • Fast.
    • Ethernet.
    • Duplexer, 250-sheet drawer, and 50-sheet multipurpose tray standard.
    • Maximum 850-sheet input capacity.
    • Low-quality photo output, even for a mono laser.

Dell B2360dn Specs

Color or Monochrome Monochrome
Connection Type Ethernet
Connection Type USB
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 80000 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 1
Print Duplexing
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 40 ppm
Type Printer Only
All Specs

Nearly identical to the Dell B2360d($129.00 at Amazon) that I recently reviewed, the Dell B2360dn($150.00 at Amazon) adds only one feature: network support. However, that one feature makes a tremendous difference. The B2360d's lack of network support makes it a niche product, as a mono laser personal printer with exceptionally heavy-duty capability for personal use. The B2360dn's added Ethernet connector and optional Wi-Fi adapter ($49 direct) makes it a shared printer for heavy-duty needs in a micro or small office or workgroup. It also makes it an easy pick for Editors' Choice in that role.

Like the Dell B2360d, the B2360dn is directly competitive with the Editors' Choice Brother HL-6180DW, but more so. It's a head-to-head competitor not just as a potential personal printer, but as a shared printer too. Both the Brother and Dell printers deliver their own mix of strengths, with HL-6180DW offering a somewhat higher paper capacity (at 550 sheets standard and 1,050 sheets maximum), and a lower cost per page, while the B2360dn offers faster speed on our tests. Which one you prefer will depend largely on which strengths you find more appealing.

Basics

Although the B2360d can't quite match the HL-6180DW for paper handling, it comes close, and it certainly offers enough to qualify for heavy-duty use by micro- and small-office standards. The printer includes a duplexer (for two-sided printing), a 250-sheet drawer, and a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray as standard, for a total 300-sheet capacity. If you need more, you can add a 550-sheet tray ($239.99 direct for the standard version or $284.99 for a lockable version), for a maximum total of 850 sheets.

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Not too surprisingly, given the similarity to the Dell B2360d, the B2360dn is essentially the same size and weight, at 31.1 pounds and 10.3 by 15.7 by 15 inches (HWD). But while a mono laser that size is a little bigger than usual for personal use, it's reasonably typical for a shared printer for a micro or small office. More important, it's small enough so you should be able to find enough room for it easily.

Speed and Output Quality

For my tests I installed the printer on a network using its Ethernet connector and ran the tests from a system running Windows Vista. Setup was absolutely standard for the breed.

Dell rates the B2360dn at 40 pages per minute (ppm), which is the same rating it gives the Dell B2360d and a touch slower than Brother's rating for the HL-6180DW. On our tests, the two Dell printers were effectively tied, which isn't always true even for the same printer using different kinds of connections (USB and Ethernet in this case). More to the point, both were faster than the Bother printer.

Dell B2360dn

On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software) the B2360dn came in at an effective 15.0 pages per minute (ppm), making it significantly faster than the HL-6180W, at 10.7 ppm, as well as faster than most other mono lasers in its price range.

Output quality for the B2360dn is a touch below par overall, but good enough for most business needs. Both text and graphics were at the low end of the range where most mono lasers fall. For text, that translates to being good enough for almost any business need, unless you have an unusual need for small fonts. For graphics, it translates to being easily good enough for any internal business use, but a touch short of what you probably would consider good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like.

Photos were a step below par for a mono laser, making them good enough to print recognizable images from photos on Web pages, but a little short of what I'd want for, say, a client newsletter with photos.

Although the Dell B2360dn's output quality costs the printer some points, the quality is more than good enough for most office use, and the overall balance of speed, paper handling, and output quality is more than a little attractive. If photo or graphics quality is a particular concern, the Brother HL-6180DW, with its slightly better-looking output, will probably be your preferred printer. However, both the Brother and Dell printers offer essentially the same text quality, which is usually more important for a mono laser, and the Dell B2360dn's faster speed is both a key strength and enough to make it an Editors' Choice.

More Multi-function Printer Reviews:

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Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Dell B2360dn - Laser Printers

Dell B2360dn Review

4.0 Excellent

The Dell B2360dn's speed and paper handling make it a good fit as a shared monochrome laser printer for heavy-duty printing in a micro or small office or workgroup.

Get It Now
Best Deal£399.99

Buy It Now

£399.99

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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