Dell V505 Printer Review
I feel good about the DellV505 printer. There are three reasons for this. Firstly because while the MSRP is $169, the street price is considerably less and you should be able to pick one up for around $100. Secondly, if you buy the red one you are participating in the PRODUCT Red Project – a part of all proceeds from all products that are part of this program (it involves lots of companies and industries) goes to help AIDS victims in Africa. And thirdly is because it is a good little all in one machine for its price.
First of all – the specifications:
All in one machine – prints, scans, copies and faxes
Speed – up to 31 ppm in monochrome and 27 ppm in color
Scan resolution – 1200 x 1200 dpi
Print resolution – 4800 x 1200 dpi
Automatic document feeder – 25 sheets maximum
Paper tray – 100 pages maximum
Built in card reader
Built in duplexing
Duty cycle – 3,000 pages per month maximum
As you can see this is designed to be a home printer, or a small office one where people don’t use the printer very much.
There’s nothing much one can say about the size or looks. They are exactly what you would expect – conservative in the typical Dell way.
Setting it up can be a problem. A friend of mine downloaded the drivers and finished the set up but could not print the test page because the drivers of the V505 were not compatible with his Dell Laptop. When the drivers were downloaded to another brand notebook they worked fine. It’s odd! Maybe my friend made a mistake when downloading – that’s the most logical conclusion. Anyway, just be warned.
With the drivers in the other laptop the printer worked great. People who buy this printer should consider downloading some of the extra software like the OCR. It’s worthwhile.
Using the printer is child’s play. The software is intuitive and easy to use. There are 4 print modes – photo, automatic, normal and draft and they do exactly what their names imply. The print quality on each setting is acceptable – not really great but not bad at all and more than okay for a printer of this price.
The display is only one line but that’s enough. All the choices you want are on the control panel. A nice feature is that if you are on a network you can choose which computers to send scans and copies to. The built in card reader which accepts most memory cards, making it easy to print directly from the printer.
As with all inkjet printers, the manufacturers’ speed estimates were off by about 20 to 25%. Having said that, the V505 has all the speed you will need, even in the photo mode, for any home application.
Scan and photo quality were more than adequate and a full size document takes less than half a minute to scan.
All in all, except for the glitch with the set up, there’s nothing wrong with the V505. Unless you do heavy duty printing, scanning or copying at home, it will do all that you could ask of it. And all for about $100 including helping AIDS victims.
Rating:
Value for money – 5/5
Ease of Use – 4/5
Print quality – 3/5
Over all – 4/5