The Dell Printer - E310dw ($129.99) delivers enough capability—including fast speed, good paper handling, and support for mobile printing—that it can serve as a shared printer in a micro office. However, it's an even better fit as a personal monochrome laser printer. Quite simply, its combination of low price and micro-office level of capability makes it an easy pick as our Editors' Choice monochrome laser printer for personal use.

Among the more obvious competition for the E310dw ($443.00 at Amazon) are the Brother HL-L2300D ($79.99 at Amazon) , another top pick for personal use, and the Samsung Xpress M2825DW ($297.08 at Amazon) , our Editors' Choice for a micro office. Compared with the Brother printer, the E310dw adds Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct as alternatives to connecting via USB. It also adds mobile printing and printing from cloud-storage and document-management websites. Compared with the Samsung model, it's a bit slower and has much lower text quality, a combination that gives the Samsung printer the edge for a micro office. However, the E310dw's low price still makes it an attractive alternative.

Basics

Paper handling for all three of these printers is essentially identical, with a 250-sheet main tray, a one-sheet manual feed, and a duplexer for two-sided printing. That's easily enough for almost any personal use and suitable for most micro offices as well.

The E310dw's mobile printing support can be a useful convenience. If you connect the printer to a network, you can print from iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices by connecting through a Wi-Fi access point. Assuming the network is connected to the Internet, you can also print through the cloud. If you choose to connect the printer to a single PC via USB cable, you'll lose the ability to print through the cloud, but you can still print from a mobile device by taking advantage of the printer's Wi-Fi Direct to connect to it directly from the device.

You can also use the E310dw to print from a selection of cloud-storage sites (including Dropbox and Box, for example). Unlike most printers that offer similar features, you don't use front-panel menu commands to retrieve files to print, and the E310dw doesn't connect directly to the websites. Instead, you run a supplied program on your PC or an equivalent downloadable app on your mobile device, and then give commands from, and relay the data through, your PC or device.

According to Dell, your PC or device connects to the Dell Document Hub website, which in turn connects to the site you want to print from. The print job follows the same path in reverse, and then goes from your PC or mobile device to the printer. The disadvantage of this approach is that you can't use the feature without turning on a PC or connecting to a mobile device. The advantage is that you can print from a website even if the printer is connected to your PC via USB cable. Because the PC-based app works only with Windows 7 or above, however, I couldn't try it out with the Windows Vista system I used for testing.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality

The E310dw weighs 19 pounds 13 ounces, making it easy for one person to move into place. At just 7.3 by 14 by 14.2 inches (HWD), it's also small enough to share a desk with comfortably. For my tests, I connected it to a network using its Ethernet port. Setup is standard fare.

Dell rates the printer at 27 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing a text document with little or no formatting. On our business applications suite I timed it (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing) at 9.2ppm. That makes it essentially tied with the Brother HL-L2300D, at 9.3ppm, but a bit slower than the Samsung M2582DW, at 9.9ppm.

Graphics and photo quality are both typical for a monochrome laser printer. However, text is at the bottom of the range for lasers, which makes the overall output quality a bit below par. The good news is that the bar for monochrome laser text is high enough that even being at the low end of the range is good enough for almost any business use. As long as you don't have an unusual need for small font sizes, you shouldn't have any complaints.

See How We Test Printers

Graphics quality is more than acceptable for any internal business need. Less-demanding users should find it good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. I wouldn't use the printer for graphics output going to a client or customer I wanted to impress, but it's generally good enough for anything short of that. As with most monochrome lasers, photo quality is good enough for printing recognizable images from photos on webpages, but not for anything more demanding.

Conclusion

If you need a shared printer for use in a micro office with particularly high-quality text, be sure to consider the Samsung M2825DW. If you're looking for a personal printer, the Brother HL-L2300D will also give you a bit better text quality than the E310dw, but with a touch lower graphics quality, which makes both printers roughly equal for overall output quality.

That said, if text that's good enough for most business use is adequate for your needs, the Dell Printer - E310dw will do just fine on that score. Factoring in its balance of speed, paper handling, connection choices, price, and mobile printing support is enough to make it an attractive alternative as a shared printer in a micro office and our Editors' Choice personal monochrome laser printer.

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