First Impressions: Dell Personal Laser Printer P1500

Like many if not most people these days, I have an inkjet at home. And they sure are cool for printing out color photos and such. My Epson S900 is a great inkjet printer and for those doing color stuff, I highly recommend it.

But like many people, I feel like I'm a slave to the printer. I mean, the thing has like a dozen different ink cartridges that are always running out of ink so that half the time I can't really print.

These days, I print a lot of documents. Source code to review, articles, code journals, long threads here on WinCustomize, etc. I actually don't like reading stuff on the screen. Don't get me wrong, I'm not cranking out tons of printed materials or anything. But I probably print 4 or 5 pages per day (which I do recycle) and the inket just doesn't cut it for that over the long haul.

So I decided to get a nice quick, inexpensive personal laser printer. And I ended up going with the Dell P1500. It's basically a Lexmark personal laser printer rebranded. For $290, it's a great little laser printer.

First off, it's fast. 19 pages per minute. 1200DPI.

But also important, it's a breeze to set up. I've still not opened the manual. I literally took it out of the box, took off the various stickers, and plugged it into a free USB port and printed out a blog entry from one of the sites I frequent. Worked like a charm.

Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing high tech about this printer. There are probably better bang for the buck printers out there. But for people like me who just want to a reasonably cheap easy to get going laser printer for printing out docs, so far, this thing looks pretty good.