The Dell 3100cn color laser printer is the follow up model to the 3000Cn. Similarities between the two include the technology used (color laser, 600 by 600 dpi resolution). Speed is the same, 25 pages per minute for black print and 5ppm when you're printing color. Both models also feature a 10/100BaseT Ethernet interface, USB and parallel ports. Cables aren't included with either model, but Dell will provide them for you in exchange for around $20.

What Dell decided to add to the newer model is a second 250 sheet paper drawer and a 150 sheet input tray. If you really need more capacity, you can get an optional 500 sheet third drawer. This will get you up to 900 sheets. Size-wise, you still get a bulky printer, weighting 33kg.



The reason why most businesses chose a laser printer is that they offer much better speeds in the case of high quantities of paper. They are also cheaper in the long run (less money/print). You should chose a laser color printer if you know for sure that you value fast printing of texts and graphics, you work with a lot of paperwork and need a lot of pages printed out on a daily basis, and want to save money even if this compromises quality a bit. While they aren't as good at creating attractive color images on glossy paper, like inkjets, they print satisfactory photos as well.

The Dell 3100cn color laser printer doesn't really abide to that rule. It compromises a bit on the speed side, and it's not exactly as fast as your designated big office printers, but it also offers the photographic quality that you'll most likely encounter in the case of an inkjet printer. The print per page cost is very low and the price tag of the printer itself is somewhat lower than in the case of similar products.



The printer's four toner cartridges (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) will last for just about 4000 pages at 5 percent coverage. There is one drawback though, the speed of color prints. Its 4.5 to 5 color pages per minute possition it on the 'i'm slow' corner in the laser color printer store. The Dell 3100cn uses a toner management system that will keep track of consumable levels and post the results on the front LCD screen. It handles all types of paper and media, including 4 by 6 inch postcards, custom size banners, card stock, labels or envelopes of basically all sizes.

The 3100cn ships with 64MB of RAM, support for Windows, Mac and Linux and an easy to install software. Installing it is also easy, and there are step-by-step instructions in the box for installing the toners, connecting it to a computer and setting up a workgroup. While speed doesn't recommend it for a big office full of people, for a small workgroup of around 10 people it should be an ideal candidate.

What goes best with a digital photo camera? Why, a photo printer of course, preferably one that is small in size and offers high quality prints that you can share with your friends and family. Like in the case of any other product, when buying a photo printer there are several technologies and products you can choose from. There are two types of photo printers that are relevant at this point : inkjet vs dye-sublimation photo printers.

Siemens was responsible for the first inkjet printing device that hit the market in 1951. The continuous inkjet printer technology was perfected and introduced later by IBM, around 1970. But while the inkjet printer has been around for many many years, it wasn't until much later that people actually considered using it for printing photos, and not just text. At this time, inkjet printers are the most common and used printers on the market. But how do they work? Well, what basically happens is that the printer doses very small 'bubbles' of ink onto a paper sheet to create text or an image.

There are two main inkjet technologies that manufacturers are using in today's devices. The first, thermal bubble (also known as bubble jet) is most frequently used by the two well known printer manufacturers, Canon and HP. It uses tiny resistors to create heat. The heat vaporizez ink and really small bubbles are created. The ink bubble then starts expanding and the ink is pushed out of a nozzle straight onto the sheet of paper. The second type of technology is know as piezoelectric. It uses piezo crystals (one crystal at the back of each nozzle) which receives a tiny electric charge. It starts to vibrate inward and pushes a very small amount of ink. Both these technologies work just fine for printing out text, images, and with the help of special photo paper, even decent quality photos.

Dye sublimation printing was invented to provide photo lab quality pictures at home.What didn't make them very popular in the beginning was the extremely high price of the devices. But the more prices go down, more digital camera owners are choosing this technology over inkjet, that quite frankly can't compare as quality. Compared to inkjet, in dye sublimation printing colors aren't just pushed to the paper sheet as individual dots. Featuring a roll of transparent film there are solid dyes that correspond to the four main colors used in printing (CMYB – cyan, magenta, yellow, black). As the print head passes over the film, it heats up and causes those dyes to vaporize. The dye never goes through liquid stage, it turns straight from solid to gas. When the ink turns into gas, it diffuses onto the photo paper and solidifies. This means no small specks of ink to be seen (like in the case of inkjet). Hence, photos look more realistic and lab-quality-like.

Both the inkjet and the dye-sublimation technologies weren't readily available to the home user. In the beginning inkjet was mainly used for text, while dye-sublimation printers were limited to high-end commercial printing (due to the high costs involved). Nowadays, both printer types can be found around the $100 price tag. In an inkjet vs dye-sublimation photo printers race, if a consumer needs the device strictly for printing photos, then the dye-sublimation one should win, quality-wise. But if you need an office printer to handle all your reports and paperwork as well, inkjet is worth considering.

After you've received the printer you'll probably hurry right ahead to take it out of the box. There are a couple of Hewlett Packard A 630 printer instructions you should follow. Make sure you remove the packing tape and materials around the printer. In the box you should find the actual printer, power supply and adapters, a couple of basic guides, HP Advanced Photo paper sampler and an introductory HP 110 Tri-color print cartridge that will last you for about 10 photos. After you've placed all the 'accessories' away, in a safe place, just place the printer on your desk and raise the printer's screen. If you need an adapter plug for your country, make sure to connect it to the power cord. If not, proceed to connection the power cord to the back of the printer and into an electrical outlet. You can now press the ON button to turn the printer on.

Staring at the LCD, you will notice it has a protective film. It's recommended that you peel that off. Upon start, you will need to confirm the language and country/region. As soon as you've done that, an animation will start, teaching you how to install an ink cartridge. In case you want to see it again, there will be a 'repeat' button so you can just press that. To install the cartridge, just open it's package and pull the pink tab to remove the tape. Then open the output tray and the print cartridge door. Place the cartridge into the cradle, label facing up. Also make sure that the copper-like contacts are facing towards the inside. Push the cartridge a bit. As soon as you hear it snap into place, then you can close the cartridge door and start printing.

HP made sure that you get all instructions in the manuals as well as on the actual printer, therefore, you'll be watching another animation teaching you how to align and load your paper. Place a few sheets of paper (you have some included in the sample pack). Glossy side of the paper has to be facing the front of the printer. After you've managed to align it correctly, just press OK to print for the first time.

There are two ways to use the HP A 630 for printing. One way is to insert a memory card straight into the printer's slot (the card does not insert all the way into the printer, but the memory card light will flash then remain solid after the card is inserted correctly). On the menu, on the LCD, you can select view and print. All the photos on your page will be listed, and you can simply select any of them to print them out.

The other way to print is the standard, old-fashioned way, aka using your PC. Hp made sure that the user isn't inconvenienced with installing drivers, thus, as soon as the printer connects to the computer, HP quick connect software will autorun. You can just follow the instructions on the PC screen to install the software. After the install is done, it basically works like any other printer.This pretty much covers Hewlett Packard A 630 printer instructions and by following this simple steps you should have no problems at all.

Digital photography implies mobility. To be good at it, you need to have a good quality camera that you can take along with ease anywhere you go. If you want to also print your pictures, this would usually imply that you go back home, connect the camera to your PC and just use the bulky printer on your desk to put your art onto paper. But what if you could do that on the go?

Sony came up with a solution for people who want a small, portable printer, the Sony DPP-MP1 digital photo printer. The device is remarkably small and lightweight. Without the battery and paper tray, it weighs just under one pound. And as to it's size, most digital cameras measure more than it.

In the pack, it comes with a paper tray, AC adapter, USB cable and a test printing pack. The optional battery pack can be attached to the end of the printer. With it, you may use the printer just about anywhere. Also included are for rechargeable AA batteries (1700 mAH, NiMH) as well as a charger for them. It uses a dye sublimation type thermal print system and can hold a maximum of 12 paper sheets in it's tray.

There are two ways that you can use the printer. The quickest and probably most convenient is to remove the Memory Stick from your digital camera and insert it into the printer. Make sure to use the Digital Print Order Form on your camera before taking the card out. After that, just press the DPOF button on the printer, to print out all the pictures that you've placed on the list. There's also an option to select the printer and number of prints manually.

If that doesn't do it for you, you could always connect the printer to a computer (via the USB port) and use any graphics program for printing your pictures out. You should have also installed the printer's drivers beforehand.

The DPP-MP1 can print borderless 3.8 megapixel 3.25 by 2 inch photos, the quality is way above average and the speed isn't bad either. It will take just about 90 seconds to print a picture straight from your digital camera's memory stick. The quality of the photo, after print, is great too. The prints are waterproof and will not deteriorate. For printing, it uses durable business card-size paper, that can be easily found on the market in packs of 24.

Other features include tone and color management, date stamping and a feature called 'fit' which basically shrinks large images into a smaller frame, without eliminating the edges of the shot. As a conclusion, the Sony DPP-MP1 digital photo printer is palm-sized, high quality, and a perfect companion for your digital camera. In a couple of minutes, you could have snapped the picture as well as printed it out, to show your friends.

As most users know, printers do have a bad habit of sometimes causing you problems. They usually range from printing lines to not printing at all, or not feeding the paper properly but there are a couple of things you can try for fixing any of them, before you decide to ship your printer off, back to your manufacturer. This also stands for Epson printer stylus color 880/880i/8 problems.

If the Epson Stylus Color 880 isn't printing at all, the first step you need to take is make sure the printer cable is properly connected to the printer as well as your PC port. To check if this was the problem, you'll need to power off the PC and try printing again. If your printer is simply taking out blank pages, you need to make sure that you are using the correct printer driver and that the paper size selected in the driver is the right one as well. For a printer that's only using black ink for everything, check the printer drivers to see if it isn't by any chance set to print black only. There's also a chance that the print head nozzles are clogged.

One clear sign that the print head nozzles may be clogged is that the printer makes a sound exactly like it does when it actually prints, even if there's no ink on the paper coming out. In this case, go to your printer driver yet again and perform a head cleaning. After that you may also try a nozzle check. Examine the printed dot pattern and see if it looks like it's supposed to, with no gaps or missing parts. If there are gaps, perform another printing check.

Another problem that some users seem to be experiencing is that upon the installment of a new cartridge the Stylus Color 880 will start doing continuous cleaning cycles. The manufacturer considers this a normal process. It apparently takes up to 2 minutes to initialize the printer from installing a new ink cartridge and Epson recommends that you keep the printer turned on till the point where you know for sure it has not moved or made any noise for over 5 minutes.

While this covers the problems you can have with actual printing, let's take some time to talk about what can happen with the paper as well. If the printer won't feed paper, first check if there are any errors. You may run across the 'paper not loaded correctly' one. If that's the case, remove your paper from the sheet feeder, make sure it's the appropriate size, that it's not creased or loaded above the arrow on the left edge of the tray. If this still doesn't do the truck, power the device off and power it on again.

These quick solutions should work for minor Epson printer stylus color 880/880i/8 problems, but if they don't, make sure and contact your provider or Epson support.