V305W

Dell aims its Dell V305W colour inkjet multifunction printer at budget-constrained small-office users, stuffing it with a multitude of features for the price.

Regrettably, a bear trap lies hidden in that low unit price: high ink costs overshadow the Dell V305W many good attributes.

The Dell V305W is well-equipped for a low-volume small or home office. It has integrated 802.11b/g wireless connectivity, a 100-sheet rear input slot, and a 25-sheet front output tray. It offers manual duplexing (two-sided printing) with helpful prompts. Two media-card slots let you work with photos easily. Dell bundles ABBYY FineReader 6.0 Sprint (a simple OCR package) and Dell Imaging Toolbox, which centralises scanning, copying, and photo-editing features. The only thing we missed was an automatic document feeder (the HP OfficeJet J4680 does offer that feature).

Dell put a lot of thought into the Dell V305W's documentation: there's plenty of it, and it's extremely thorough.

The control panel's layout, though very simple, has some quirks. You surf menu options, shown on the two-line OLED text display, using two navigation buttons and a third, big button labeled with a checkmark. The Dell V305W's display also shows ink levels, but you can't tell which cartridge is which. It's also hard to guess how to wake up the printer; you're supposed to press an arrow button, but Dell doesn't document this explicitly.

In our tests, the Dell V305W ranged from awesome to adequate. It blasted through plain-text documents at a rate of 10.7 pages per minute. The text itself was black and crisp. But when we sent colour photos and other graphics through the pipeline, the Dell V305W slowed considerably, to 1.2ppm or less. Images printed on plain paper looked anaemic; on Dell's own photo paper, the same images smoothed out and looked a little yellow, but had nice detail. Scan and copy quality were mediocre: dark, rough, and fuzzy.

The ink costs will make your jaw drop. The machine ships with a standard-size black cartridge and a tricolour cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridge. Each of these cartridges lasts for a mere 125 pages in a best-case scenario. The (relatively) high-yield versions of the cartridges offer little relief: a 210-page black cartridge costs $27.50 (7 cents per page), while the corresponding colour cartridge costs $31.90 and last 190 pages.