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Dell 942

Date: Apr 18, 2005
Contributor: Melisa Mcglone

Easy-to-use all-in-one printer

IT’s not really a stretch to say that all-in-one printers are the hottest printing category right now. While photo printing remains popular, customers have been gravitating towards printers that also have scan and copy capabilities, and for good reason: when desk space is limited, an all-in-one printer helps save a couple of bucks as part of the bargain.
While Dell has both photo printers and all-in-one printers in store, its latest generation put both technologies into a single chassis. The Dell 942 is the company’s latest attempt at the consumer photo printing solution.
Designed to simplify the digital photo printing process, the Dell 942 includes features to make printing images quick and easy, with or without a computer.
The Dell 942 is a typical all-in-one printer – it can produce borderless prints in six colours. You can print images from your computer or directly from a memory card or PictBridge-compatible digital camera.
For direct printing from removable media, the printer supports CompactFlash Type I and II, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, MultiMediaCard, Secure Digital, SmartMedia, and xD-Picture Card.
With its 2.5-inch liquid crystal display (LCD) screen, full-featured control panel and a built-in scanner, the Dell 942 can do a lot without the need for a computer.
In addition, to give users an easy-to-navigate menu for displaying and printing photos directly from the photo card slots, the LCD screen doubles as a tutorial screen. For example, the screen offers tips on how to change the cartridge with a series of pictures and step-by-step guides. The printer has an attractive menu system that most users will find easy to grasp.
A particularly neat feature is the countdown timer. It indicates the time it takes to output a print, making tracking printing progress informative.
There are three main modes on the Dell 942 – copy, scan and print – all of which can be easily switched by using the mode buttons.
There is no fax or automatic document feeder, but you’ll find a utility that lets you scan and fax using your computer’s modem.
Like most photo printers, the Dell 942 can use either a black and tricolour cartridge for four-colour printing or a photo and tricolour cartridge for six-colour printing.
The option to use a photo cartridge along with the tri-colour cartridge for six-colour printing helps justify the photo-printer designation. Using six colours would likely improve photo quality marginally, but it would certainly yield slower performance.
The Dell 942 offers a claimed print speed of up to 19 pages per minute (draft, monochrome) and an optimised print resolutions of up to 4,800 by 1,200 dots per inch while the scanner lets you copy and scan at up to 4,800 by 1,200dpi.
Accessing the various functions of the Dell 942 is made easy with the Control Panel at the top of the printer, a good feature if you just want to make a single copy or scan without turning on your PC.
When your PC is switched on, you can access the enhanced print and scanning options through the software. The software also includes a photo editor program for easy photo editing.
When connected to a PC, the Dell 942 serves as a printer and a scanner. The bundled software provide some very useful functions. The printer driver lets you set up duplex jobs and create booklets, reduce and print several pages on one sheet, as well as 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 and image clean-up. If you’re new to scanning, the Dell 942 makes it easy.
Dell’s Imaging Studio software is a breeze to use and provides basic tools for enhancing photographs on your computer. Dell includes applications to edit card images on your PC, but both are crippleware, which means after 90 days, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8.0 will expire and Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album 4.0 will revert 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 and can be edited from the PC later.
The Dell 942 makes printing from a digital camera or computer relatively easy, but the print quality and speed are just on par, even on a variety of media. Its six-colour printing system produces lifeless images that suffer heavily from banding (vertical lines) on regular paper.
Graphics were at the high end of good, and photos were very good, but these are middling ratings for an inkjet. Dithering was less noticeable on high-quality paper using the software’s default settings, and text quality on regular paper was actually good, remained tight and controlled with little evidence of bleeding.
Areas of solid black appeared greyer, but this is a feature frequently seen with entry-level inkjet printers. In other words, you really do need to use expensive paper to get decent results from the Dell 942.
If there’s a downside with the Dell 942, it would be the single paper tray. As the Dell 942 is both a copier and a photo printer, this means each time you switch between photo and copy mode, you will need to change the paper size from the standard 8.5-by-11-inch to five-by-seven-inch photo paper. If you use your printer for both types of printing regularly, it is a hassle to keep on changing the paper.
The Dell 942 is compatible with Windows XP and 2000 but not the earlier versions. And it won’t support any Macintosh operating system.








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