At the Vostro launch earlier this week in San Francisco, Dell showed a $299 desktop colour laser printer it claims outperforms competing printers from HP and Samsung (the 300 series).

"Samsung's 300 series printer uses a caroussel or a multi-path technology which implies that the engine rotates every time it has to apply any of the four basic colours (black, magenta, yellow and cyan). That's why the colour speed (4 ppm) is 1/4th the monochrome speed. And our old 3010cn was using a similar technology", explains Fabio Ramos, product manager for Dell's Imaging & Printing Group.

Dell 1320c to outperform HP 's 1600/2600n and Samsung's 300 compact colour laser printers

On the other hand, Dell's 1320c printer uses a Fuji-Xerox vertical engine that allows a top speed of 12ppm for both colour and monochrome.

"We are the first company to bring this technology to market... the Dell 1320c is at least 50% faster in colour printing than the comparable (in price and size) HP 1600 and 2x faster in black", added Fabio Ramos.

Finally, Dell estimates that with a 2000 pages cartridge, the cost per page will range from 3 cents/page in monochrome and 14 cents/colour page.