Dell 1133 laser multifunction printer

The Dell 1133 monochrome multifunction laser printer is surprisingly bulky but offers fast printing. Dell quotes a print speed of up to 22 A4 monochrome text pages per minute, and that's pretty close to the speed we attained during our tests. Print quality is good at the default 600x600dpi resolution setting and its scanning is adequate, but nothing special. Its low price and fast output make the Dell 1133 a far superior choice to a similarly priced inkjet-based business printer, as long as you don't need to print in colour.

Dell 1133 multifunction: Design and specifications

The Dell 1133 laser multifunction certainly isn't an attractive piece of technology. It's designed to be functional rather than look good: it has a paper input tray at the bottom, an additional feeder half-way up its body, and an output tray at the top. A flatbed scanning tray can be found on the top of the printer.

The Dell 1133 uses a single monochrome toner cartridge that can handle 1500 pages. A high-yield version is also available with a 2500 page rating, and it only costs a few dollars more. The maximum monthly duty cycle of the Dell 1133 is 12,000 pages per month, which should be plenty for small businesses.

A 250 sheet input tray is a little small for our liking — although Dell's Web site boasts that you can actually store 251 sheets by using the single-sheet feeder in the printer body at the same time. The output tray can hold a maximum of 80 sheets. We're a little confused by the placement of the output tray, as printed sheets barely protrude from the printer's body.

The Dell 1133 can only be connected over USB; no network port is available. This means that you'll have to go through the tedious process of sharing the printer via Windows if you've got multiple computers to print from. This annoying omission is due to the budget price of the Dell 1133. No USB cable is included with the printer — you'll need to fork out an extra few dollars for one.

Dell 1133 multifunction: Print quality and speed

Dell quotes a print speed of 22 A4 pages per minute for the 1133. Our tests revealed a real-world printing speed nearing this during longer print runs — a 100 page document was printed in just under 5min, which is a print speed of over 20 pages per minute. Large-volume runs to achieve this figure will quickly empty the paper input tray, though. The first page usually takes around 10 seconds to print, but subsequent pages are pumped out every 2.5 seconds. No automatic duplexing (doublesided printing) is available, which may annoy businesses trying to cut paper costs.

We achieved our print speed at the default 600x600dpi resolution. Text is clean and generally free of any aberrations — there is no bleeding of text and no horizontal or vertical banding on monochrome images. Images aren't of particularly high quality, though. A 1200x1200dpi print option is also available, but prints take slightly longer and we didn't see an appreciable increase in quality with a standard 12pt text document. Monochrome image quality was marginally improved.

Dell 1133 multifunction: consumable costs and scan quality

The Dell 1133's 1500-page toner cartridge costs $97.90 direct from Dell's Web site. This translates into a cost per A4 page of 6.52 cents. If you opt for the 2500-page high-yield toner at a cost of only $110 (that's $12.10 extra for 1000 more pages), the ongoing printing cost of the Dell 1133 falls to 4.40 cents per A4 page. These costs are certainly not the lowest we've seen from a monochrome laser printer — more expensive and bulky printers like the Fuji Xerox WorkCentre 4250 can get costs down to near two cents per page. However, given the Dell printer's low initial cost these are more than acceptable rates, and are far lower than an inkjet like the Canon PIXMA MX350.

The flatbed scanner on the top of the Dell 1133 has a door that's hinged at the rear of the printer's body. The hinges can also extend around 2cm, allowing thicker documents and ledgers to be scanned. We found scan quality from the Dell 1133 to be good but not excellent, with colour scanning introducing a small amount of posterisation to images. Monochrome text is scanned effectively though, and is clear enough to read text at sizes above 8pt.

Dell 1133 multifunction: Conclusion

The Dell 1133 prints good quality text and reasonable quality monochrome images at high speeds. It doesn't have a network port and can't automatically print doublesided documents, but the low initial cost and moderate ongoing running cost means it's a good choice for businesses looking to expand their printing capabilities without spending too much.

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