Dell C3760dn review

Dell’s C3760dn is larger than most entry-level colour lasers and, if we’re honest, a bit ugly too. Its square edges do nothing to soften the effect of a huge black box sat in the corner of the room, noisily chucking out paper, but ‘chucking’ is the right word, as it’s rated for a fast 35 pages per minute (ppm).

In fact, other than cosmetic differences, this printer is essentially the same as Xerox’s Phaser 6600DN, which isn’t a bad thing when it comes to the specification: duplex (double-sided) printing is standard, as is a huge 550-sheet input cassette and an additional 150-page multi-purpose feed. Wired Gigabit Ethernet ensures plenty of bandwidth and, unlike the Phaser, this printer has a USB host port for direct printing – it’s easy to browse a flash drive’s contents and select options such as duplexing or multiple copies before printing.

^ There’s a comprehensive web interface. Here we’re configuring email alerts for low supplies or jammed paper

Dell rates this printer for up to 80,000 pages per month, and our battered and well-travelled sample looked like it might have come close on more than one occasion. Other than a stiff paper tray it worked perfectly, though, suggesting that the printer is built to last. Higher up on the front panel, the multipurpose feed feels robust, although we had a paper jam when envelope printing that we couldn’t clear at first – it took a while to realise that we could remove the entire tray assembly from the printer. Printing an envelope revealed that the multipurpose tray’s markings are wrong by 180°, and even when we’d compensated the result was crumpled anyway.

Grumbles aside, this is an impressive printer. It reached 28.3ppm on our 25-page text test, which includes the time taken to spool and start printing the job. Over longer jobs, where the initial spool has less effect, the printer would be likely to hit Dell’s claimed speeds. Colour speeds weren’t so impressive, however, with the printer pausing before some pages in our graphics test, and managing just 11ppm over 24 pages.

^ This printer’s Windows 8 PCL driver is extremely basic

^ The XPS driver looks modern and offers a better range of functions

Although the C3760dn uses similar consumables to the Phaser 6600DN, they aren’t interchangeable, and there are differences in the details. Most importantly, Dell’s printer takes a high-yield black toner cartridge rated at a generous 11,000 pages, and colour equivalents rated for 9,000 pages each. Dell doesn’t usually consider the fuser and transfer rollers as replaceable items, but the former is covered if you sign up to an extended warranty. Both items should last at least 100,000 pages, and can be bought through third-party dealers. Calculated on toner alone, a page of black costs less than 0.9p and a black and colour page 6.5p. Including all eight consumables gives 1.2p and 7.3p respectively, which is still inexpensive. 

^ Dell’s Android app lets you print from a variety of sources

This printer produced excellent text, but although its graphic prints were generally of high quality they lacked saturation, appearing a bit drab when compared to the best of the competition. We tried switching to the XPS driver, which offers more options than the basic PCL interface, but the quality was unchanged. This is enough to rob this otherwise impressive printer of an award.