New York, NY -- Reviewed in late February 2010 by PC World, the printer is definitely geared towards offices that print at a high volume due to both its price (see below) and its duty cycle (110,000 pages/month). It is capable of a maximum print speed of 47ppm, prompting Dell to tout it as the “World's Fastest Single Function Letter Format Color Laser Printer”. It is a large machine, measuring 17.0" x 22.1" x 20.0" (H x W x D) and weighs close to 100lbs. which makes a good choice for placement paramount in the beginning.
The feature that offices will likely most enjoy is the printer’s expandability. It comes out of the box with 256MB of standard memory, but companies could choose to purchase 1,024MB of additional memory for a total of 1.2GB. The standard paper configuration is a 550-sheet main tray and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray. For an additional $249, you can purchase another 550-sheet tray and for $599, an 1100-sheet tray is available. If you needed anything else after those upgrades, for $999, you could acquire a 1,000-sheet staple mechanism that can staple up to 50 pages together.
The LCD , cursor, and associated buttons were rated by the reviewer as intuitive. The 5130 comes with an HTML-based internal configuration site which allows you to manage settings through a web browser. If you need flexibility in where you place the machine, in addition to the standard USB connectivity, it offers both Ethernet and wireless connectivity. To be wireless requires the purchase of a $150 wireless network card.
For a machine at this price, the savings is realized in the toner. There are four separate cartridges: a 9,000-page yield black cartridge and 6,000-page yield color cartridges (cyan, magenta, and yellow). All standard sized cartridges come with the printer and the black cartridge costs $107 to replace for a cost per page of 1.2 cents and the color cartridges cost $195 each which adds up to 3.3 cents per page per color. If you need more volume than that from your printer cartridge each has an high yield option which will print double the pages. You can buy an 18,000-page yield black cartridge for $137 and 12,000-page yield color cartridge for $245. That works out to less than a penny a page and 2 cents per page respectively.
If your company has the money, this printer should be well worth it. However, for few hundred dollars less, you could purchase an HP Color LaserJet Enterprise CP4025dn.
