Dell C2665DNF review

The Dell C2665DNF is a colour laser multifunction printer that’s designed for moderate use in a small business or workgroup. It’s a medium-sized device with all the essential features a small business needs, such as printing, scanning, copying, faxing and network connectivity. With a 50,000-page maximum monthly print volume, it’s clearly built to withstand office use, and it feels well made.

The C2665DNF has two paper trays, but together they hold only 400 sheets; an additional 550-sheet paper tray is available as a £200 option. Conveniently, the printer and scanner can handle automatic duplex operation, so you can make double-sided copies of double or single-sided originals, which saves paper.

The C2665DNF is controlled through a huge colour touchscreen, which provides access to Dell’s Document Hub, a neat arrangement that lets you access a range of online services directly from the printer. These services include Dropbox and Microsoft SharePoint, but not Evernote. Dell provides additional features of its own, such as optical character recognition (OCR) in the cloud, although the free introductory period expires at the end of March 2014.

The C2665DNF also supports NFC (near-field communication), but at present it only pairs the printer with compatible devices running Windows 8.1. You can’t use NFC to print from smartphones. This seems like a missed opportunity, but Dell told us that it plans to broaden support in the future. Sadly, Dell’s touchscreen control didn’t seem as intuitive or responsive as rival systems we’ve used.

The installer will enable duplex printing by default, but you can opt out

Dell’s software installer takes a while to finish, but it lets you choose whether duplex printing is the default and whether to install a colour driver. Despite the availability of a 6,000-page black toner and 4,000-page colour items, running costs in toner alone work out to be 2.2p for a black page and 11.1p for colour. Factor in long-term consumables such as the drums (55,000 pages), waste toner bottle (30,000) and a 100,000-page maintenance pack and these rise to 2.4p and 11.3p respectively. The equivalent costs for the Kyocera Mita FS-C2026MFP+ are 1.3p and 6.4p respectively.

The scan interface is pretty good, although there’s no automatic marquee selection

These high costs overshadow this MFP’s other strengths somewhat. Print quality was very high, with sharp outlines and strong colours free of grain and other flaws. Scans were also good, and performance was quick overall. At 12.9ppm, our graphics-rich colour test was some way short of the claimed 27ppm, but still competitive for an MFP at this price. The C2665DNF is a good MFP, but its controls, running costs and NFC support could all be better.