By Ben Pate

Dell 5100cn color laser printer has Ethernet capability, two-sided printing, solid paper handling, and has speeds fast enough for small office use. The Dell 5100cn has several paper handling extras as well, which pairs up with the convenience of the Dell 5100cn toner. Dell's print quality is excellent, which is something we have come to expect from Dell. The Dell 5100cn Color Laser will meet your black and white and color printing needs in a cost effective manner.

The 5100cn should be quite economical to run. Black toner cartridges, are capable of printing up to 9000 pages according to Dell's page-yield estimates. Each color cartridge (cyan, magenta, and yellow) is rated for 8000 pages. You have to replace the drum every 35,000 pages, Dell estimates, you pay about 1 cent for its consumables per black and white page. This is a very economical cost for any office situation.

Set up and installation is quite easy using the standard Ethernet 10/100 BaseT networking protocol, USB, or parallel port. The machine walks you through the setup for networking the printer. The installation CD installs the drivers and also the Dell Color Track driver, and the Dell Printer Web Tool.

The Dell Printer Web Tool can be used to install, configure, and manage network printers and consumables. The Printer Web Tool tracks when toner cartridges or the drum needs to be changed, alerts when paper needs to be refilled or if there is a paper jam, and also lets you manage the settings of the printer from one place. E-mail alerts also can be sent out via this tool for alerts.

The Dell 5100cn has a standard 500 sheet paper cassette and a150 sheet multipurpose tray; there is also an option to add a 500 sheet input tray or a 1,000 sheet tray if needed. The Dell 5100cn printer also has a built in duplexer that allows you to print double sided pages quickly.

Dell 5100cn lets you add enough paper drawers at once to achieve the capacity level that suits your needs. The standard paper drawer holds up to 500 sheets, including legal paper size, while the fold down multipurpose tray holds an extra 150 sheets. You can add an additional 500 sheet paper drawer, under the printer; or an extra 1000 sheet drawer, or you can put both of these together with the standard trays to get a total paper capacity of 2150 sheets. There is a built in duplexer that allows you to print double-sided pages; your finished prints or copies go into a 250 sheet output bin that is located on top of the printer.

The Dell Color Laser 5100cn's print driver is full featured and is easy to use. The organization is a series of tabs, which allows you to adjust basics, like paper type and size, or even add a watermark. There is also a handy graphic on the driver that shows any changes you make to the printer settings.

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