Review : Dell 5130CDN, The World's Fastest Colour Printer?

The 5130CDN was sent to us for a quick review back in December, but a series of unexpected occurrences means that we can only have a look at Dell's flagship standalone colour printing workhorse now.

The Austin-based manufacturer claims that the 5130CDN is the world's fastest "letter size single-function" office colour laser printer and possibly the next best thing to an offset printer. No fear though as it can print in A4 as well.

In an ideal situation - which we will explore further - this beast can print up to 47 single sided letter pages (although the UK Dell website says 45ppm instead) and up to a staggering 37 double sided letter pages per minutes even at its highest resolution of 1200x1200 dpi.

Arguably, these claims are valid for the letter format and should also hold for the more common A4 format. So that's roughly 1.2 seconds per single sided page or 1.8 seconds for double sided ones.

What makes it even more interesting is that those figures are valid both for monochrome and colour output where normally you'd expect the latter to be substantially lower than the former.

(Top : Angled view of the printer, below : front view of the printer, note the large paper tray)