Design

The Dell 1710 is a brick-style printer comparable in size to a large toaster. With its dark grey colour scheme and basic shape, it won't win any style awards, but the Dell 1710 simply fits in. It has a large loading area up top along with an easily accessible control panel, and there's an output with a retractable tray on the front side. Due to the shape and weight, the Dell 1710 is incredibly sturdy. The only downside to the design is the vents located at the sides. Packed into a tight area, the Dell 1710 tends to run a little hot.

Advantages

The biggest advantage to the Dell 1710 is its price. Generally, heavy-duty printers are just outside what home users are willing to pay, but this one is quite reasonable. Dell has built the 1710 to last, the black Dell 1710 toner it uses is inexpensive, and has given the printer a capacity up to 800 pages. The Dell 1710 is also network-ready, and in most cases, you can simply plug it into a Windows environment and be up and running within moments. It's also fully compatible with Mac and Linux machines.

Disadvantages

One downside to the Dell 1710 is that prints colour pages at about the same rate that it prints monochrome. This means one of two things; either there's some untapped potential in monochrome printing speed or its printing colour too fast. It's probably the latter as images and other graphics tend to suffer from banding and dithering. Colour printing is good enough for web pages, but you won't want to use it for printing pictures for framing. Another issue is that it tends to run a little hot, especially if you block the vents. In theory, this could shorten the lifespan of the device, so users will want to make sure that they give the printer proper clearance in those areas.