Ah, researching office equipment–one of my favorite pastimes.  (Not!)  I took my time with this one, going back and forth with my decision tree (for instance, shifting my budget from $200 to $600, and back again).  I ultimately ordered from Staples.com, so I could return any lemon locally.  That’s a sign of me bracing against all the ways a purchase like this can go wrong.

I’m happy to report my good fortune:  not only do I have my new color printer up and running, but I found Dell customer support highly competent and remarkably responsive.

After setting up the printer, my initial test run appeared problematic:  underscore was showing more like strike-through.  Contacting Dell tech support through live-chat was instantaneous:  Niegel, the support analyst, came online the very moment I opened the chat dialogue.  Niegel was great.  His troubleshooting helped me isolate the problem to a specific application; the underscore issue only appeared when printing from Evernote.  Yay!  I wouldn’t have to return the printer, after all.

After closing the live chat module, I received an email from Niegel offering his direct contact info in case I had further questions.  He even included the contact info of his supervisor.  Now that’s transparency!  To top it off, the following day, Niegel followed up with another email, offering further assistance if I had come up with other questions.

The photo above shows the excellent quality of the printer’s text output.  Oddly, two separate PC Magazine reviews of this printer clashed in their assessments of the printer’s text quality.  Review A praised the “unusually good graphics quality” and called its text output “outstandingly sharp.”  But Review B was lukewarm, calling it “a touch below par,” further specifying the text output to be fine for “general business use, though not for uses requiring very small fonts.”  As you can see in my photo, text looks great in even 7-pt. font size.

Good show, Dell!