Great Output, Low Cost

My small office prints a lot of b/w and a fair amount of color. We wanted a single printer that could do both well without breaking the bank; the 3100cn was our choice. The price for the printer itself was very reasonable and the toner and drum cost per page was by far the the lowest we could find. If you have it set-up correctly it prints in b/w faster than printers that are almost twice the price and does a decent job with color. Photo images on a color laser don't usually come close to the quality of an inkjet, but the 3100cn is the best photo output I've ever seen from a color laser. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as photo paper for a laser printer, so I don't know how good a job it could really do with the right paper.

We've had it for 4 months now and the only bad things I can say about it is that it's noisy and sometimes sounds like something is broken inside (which isn't the case), it seems to go through the calibrating cycle a little too often, grayscale output isn't as accurate as our old HP monochrome laser, and it sometimes has a tough time printing cleanly on translucent paper--which could be a problem on any laser printer.

In my opinion, it's the best double duty color laser printer out there, especially if you need the networking capability.

* Update July 10/05 - still love this printer and Dell's delivery of replacement toner has been very fast & efficient. A new downside to note is that if you want to print directly onto standard mailing envelopes it wrinkles the envelope as it doesn't have a "straight-through" output capability. Apparently this is a space consuming, expensive feature to get on a color laser printer. We've had to again rely on our old HP monochrome.