By Ben Pate

Dell's Laser Printer 1110 replaces the Laser Printer 1100. Superficially, there's little to distinguish the 1110 from its predecessor. It's a smart white color, weighs just 5.5kg and takes up little room on a desk, so it's easy to find it a home.

This is an easy printer to get ready for use, with only one consumable that must be installed before it is set to print. The cartridge which comes with it slots quite a distance into the printer, and we found that it was hesitant to click in correctly.

A lot of us say that toner is dry solid ink. In fact, toner has nothing at all to do with solid ink. Toner, indeed, is a powder which is plastic-based and negatively charged. The blackness of copier toner results from pigments which are blended into plastic particles when being manufactured.

When you purchase your new Dell 1110 laser toner, the starter toner cartridge will only print a thousand pages, or two reams. Dell's standard-yield cartridges print about 2,000 pages, or four reams. The cost-per-page averages a reasonable .023 British pounds, or .034 US dollars. When the printing has completed, there is a paper guide that catches the finished sheets. On occasion, the paper feeder grabs an additional sheet or two. The simple solution is to remove several sheets of paper from the input tray and don't overstock it in the future.

The biggest difference between this toner and the outgoing model is the speed, which has increased from 14ppm to 16ppm. The Dell 1110 laser toner came very close to its rated speed in our test; although printing our graphical Normal speed test reduced it to just shy of 13ppm. Dell printer toner with a 600dpi resolution are often swift to print our test photos, and the 1110 completed two 10x8" prints on two sheets of A4 in an impressive 22 seconds.

Print quality was generally good, with crisp black text and clear graphics. The Dell 1110 laser toner dithering gave images and grey text a granular appearance, though, and some light banding was visible on photos. This is a good entry-level mono toner, but it's more expensive to buy and run than expected.

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