Dell 942 Photo All-in-One

The Dell 942 all-in-one photo printer skips a couple of important features and costs more than similar inkjet multifunctions, but it gets high marks for ease of use with a digital camera. However, you have to change ink cartridges when you switch between printing photos and text documents, annoying for anyone who likes to print both in the same sitting. Its 600-dots-per-inch (dpi) plain paper and 1,200dpi photo paper printer also creates attractive greyscale and colour documents -- though slower, of course, than the vendor-rated 19 pages per minute (ppm) black and 14ppm colour speeds. The 600dpi-by-2,400dpi scanner captures good quality images, too, but we hold some grudges against the 942: its fax works only through your PC's fax modem, which takes too many steps for regular use. Also, Dell makes you meddle with the ink cartridges every time you want to print photo or text documents one after the other. The Dell 942 runs on Windows XP and 2000 but not earlier Windows versions, and like other Dell machines, it won't support any Macintosh OS.

Design
The silver and dark grey Dell 942 all-in-one photo printer has a simple, uncluttered design. Its silver plastic scanner lid opens on the wider edge and covers a letter-size glass top. The machine won't hog desk space since it stands only 168mm high with trays open and sits 437mm wide by 322mm deep. Add 229mm to the depth with the paper feed support and output tray extended. Past the lid's right edge sits a clearly labeled, well-laid-out control panel, with a 2-by-1.5-inch full-colour LCD that displays menu commands and thumbnail photos. A module below the control panel provides a PictBridge port and convenient slots for most digital camera flash memory cards, including CompactFlash I and II, Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro, SmartMedia, Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard and xD-Picture Card.

To access ink cartridges, the 942 yawns open across the middle of the base. Once open, a plastic bar drops into place to prop up the lid, freeing room for your hands to pop the cartridges in and out. Because the Dell 942 holds only two cartridges at a time, you'll become intimately familiar and probably annoyed with swapping inks when you want to print photos and text in rapid succession. A sensor conveniently distinguishes between plain, coated or glossy paper and transparencies and adjusts the settings to match; but you can override those settings if you wish.

With an external power supply fitting into the back of the machine, the Dell 942 power cord thankfully lacks the bulky converter brick that would otherwise hog space on the floor or around your power socket.

Features
With its LCD, full-featured control panel, and built-in scanner, the Dell 942 all-in-one photo printer can do a lot without your computer. You can slap a document on the glass bed and punch a button for standalone colour or black copies. And by scrolling down the LCD menu, you can tweak photocopy quality, squeeze an original to print it up to 16 times on a page, and shrink or enlarge copies. The control panel is easy to use, thanks to function-specific buttons and a four-way rocker button for navigating the menu.

When you insert a memory card, the system switches into photo mode. This allows you to display and print photo thumbnails; view images as a slide show; or rotate, crop, adjust, and print pictures. But of course, you'll have to stop and switch ink if you were just printing a black text document earlier. With 32MB of RAM, the Dell 942 easily zipped through a photo card full of high-resolution images in CNET Labs' tests. The menus also let you upload photos straight from a memory card to your PC.

However, the 942 lacks one common multifunction feature: a standalone fax. Using Windows' Fax Console software and your PC's fax modem, you could scan a document, convert its format, and send it -- but that's a lot of work. Still, many multifunctions lack any fax capabilities at all, so this could work for you if you need to fax only once in a while.

When connected to a PC, the Dell 942 serves as a printer and a scanner, as well. Dell includes applications to edit card images on your PC, but both are crippleware: after 90 days Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8.0 expires, and Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4.0 reverts to a limited version. You also get the full Abbyy FineReader Sprint 5.0 optical character recognition package, which converts scanned images of text files into text you can edit on your PC.

Dell's software provides useful functions, too. The printer driver lets you set up duplex jobs and create booklets, reduce and print several pages on one sheet, produce banners, and enlarge a page into a poster. An I Want To menu walks you through printing envelopes and posters. A separate utility, the All-in-One Center, guides you through scans, faxes, and copies by making sure you pick the appropriate resolution, colour depth, image cleanup, and so on. If you're new to scanning, the Dell 942 makes it easy.

Performance
The Dell 942 all-in-one photo printer topped the chart in CNET Labs' text printing speed tests, pumping out 7ppm, far ahead of other multifunction printers. It took 4.8 minutes to print a high-resolution 8x10 photo, against the 9.6 minutes spent by the Lexmark X7170.

The Dell 942's scanner was also speedy, producing 4.2ppm for greyscale documents and 3ppm for colour. This device also photocopied 3.5ppm, again the fastest we've seen. Throughout our tests, the Dell 942 worked flawlessly overall and exceeded our expectations for a multifunction of its class. This unit was tested with it default settings, which can be adjusted to improve the performance.

For the most part, we liked the Dell 942's solid black text prints. It was hard to read at the smallest fonts but clear enough to decipher at 3-point size -- impressive for an inkjet. Big letters showed choppiness or rough edges, especially inside curves, but text looked even, smooth and clean. Colour prints looked even better than text, with smooth shading transitions, fine detail and accurate colours. Unfortunately, the document showed graininess throughout. Photographs came out grainy and a bit warm, though dynamic range was decent. We also saw signs of posterisation, a banding effect produced by reducing the number of grey tones in an image.

Against other multifunctions, the Dell 942 delivered middling scanning speeds, at 4.2 documents per minute for greyscale and 3 colour documents per minute. Though it copies at the head of the pack, churning out 3.5ppm, you'll still need to visit the local copy shop for long jobs.

We were impressed by the Dell 942's ability to distinguish between close shades of both light and dark greys in scans. However, it rendered solid black areas, even text, with a grainy, grayish look. And despite its sensitivity to grey shades, the 942 failed to pick up subtle details. Its colour scans impressed us less, since they suffered from a soft focus and faded colours, with colour tints mysteriously creeping into monochrome areas.

NOTE: Products in this test are for comparative purposes only and are not necessarily available in the Australian market.

Learn more about how CNET Labs tests printers. Performance analysis written by CNET Labs project leader Dong Van Ngo.

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