Dell C2665dnf review

Dell doesn’t mince its words with the new C2665dnf: it claims it’s the world’s smartest colour all-in-one printer, supplementing the standard 4-in-1 scan, copy, print and fax functions with NFC for mobile tap and print, and integration with Dell’s Document Hub service.

It certainly packs a lot in, and it’s more than capable of producing the goods when it comes to printing documents. The C2665dnf’s 600dpi, 27ppm print engine is right on the money for speed. A 27-page Word document printed in one minute, after an eight-second wait for the first page.

Our heavy-duty 24-page DTP document was dispatched almost as efficiently, returning 26ppm in both standard- and high-quality print modes.

Output quality is perfectly acceptable for business use, with pin-sharp text, good detail and no evident banding in mono photos. The PC Pro colour chart revealed smooth transitions across complex colour fades, which translate to detailed colour photos and punchy reports.

Copy and scan performance were equally impressive. The C2665dnf’s ADF handled a ten-page copy in just less than a minute, and although the scanner only captures one side per pass, it can perform a double-sided scan by pulling the page back in and reversing it. Colour copy quality is another area where this printer scores well.

The C2665dnf ships with standard toner cartridges, but the high-capacity versions keep running costs for mono and colour prints to a reasonable 2.1p and 11.2p per page respectively.

Unfortunately, the C2665dnf’s features aren’t quite as accomplished. It has no integrated wireless as standard – you can add it, but it costs an extra £93. Oki’s MC342dnw costs a similar amount, but 802.11n wireless is included as standard. Furthermore, Dell’s NFC support is currently limited to Windows 8.1 devices.

Printer installation on a wired network is swift, though, and Dell’s software suite is comprehensive, including an email and fax address-book editor, printer-configuration tools, a TWAIN driver for network scans and a printer app manager.

The intuitive control panel makes light work of scanning documents to FTP servers, email addresses and SMB network shares. Up to 300MB of the printer’s 1GB of memory can be used as a RAM disk, allowing users to send prints directly from the printer driver to a public or secure, password-protected private mailbox.

More interesting is Dell’s Document Hub web portal, which allows the printer to send documents directly to a selection of cloud storage services. It’s free, but only up to the end of March 2014 when Dell plans to charge for features such as cloud OCR.

We had no problems linking the Hub to our Google Drive and Dropbox accounts, and it also supports Box, SharePoint Online and SkyDrive. To send a document to the cloud, enter your Hub account credentials using the printer’s touchscreen panel and select the operation you want.

It’s also possible to use the panel to browse for specific documents across all cloud services linked to your account and print them out. A Windows app is available for directly accessing the Document Hub, although this only supports Windows 8.

The C2665dnf is a very capable colour MFP that scores well for output quality and speed. Running costs are reasonable for this market sector, and it packs in some smart features. The only fly in the ointment is the lack of integrated wireless: charging almost £100 extra for it considerably affects its Value for Money score.

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