Long Term Review of the Dell Colour Laser Printer 3110cn

Fri, May 10, 2013

I bought my Dell 3110cn laser printer back in March 2008 for 362,95 EUR. It’s got 600 x 600 dpi, USB2 and an ethernet port. The first thing to note is: the printer still works, me and my flat mates never had any problems with it. Just connect it to your network, give it a static IP address and install the drivers on every network computer that needs to print. Dell states that the included print cartridges last for approximately 5.000 pages. Up until now we have printed 8.204 pages with just one replacement of the black toner cartridge in June 2011 (78,97 EUR including shipping). The current toner fill levels are as follows:

Cyan cartridge ~ 40 % Magenta cartridge ~ 60 % Yellow cartridge ~ 30 % Black cartridge ~ 40 %

So for black the 5.000-pages-statement is pretty accurate. Color usage varies as you can see. Up until now we get the following costs per page:

( 362,95 EUR + 78,97 EUR ) / 8.204 pages = 0,053 EUR / page

And we should easily make it to 10.000 pages before we need to buy another cartridge. That would mean 0,044 EUR per page. Unfortunately the printer does not reveal any information on how many black and how many colored pages have been printed, so I can’t tell how much an average b/w page costs. We are happy with the printing quality, ease of use (tray refill, cartridge replacement), configuration and build quality. It’s not a small device though. All in all, I’d happily buy this one again if it was still 2008. But there seem to be smaller and cheaper color laser printers available today: 2.400 x 600 dpi, Ethernet, WLAN, starting from 100 EUR… phew!