Multifunction Printers Under $150

Printing Speed

Dell hasn't made any progress in the area of printing speed in photo mode. It took quite a few minutes to make an 8½x11 print, so you'll tend to settle for 4x6 most of the time. With text, on the other hand, speeds were quite good, especially since the draft mode produced good results in terms of quality.

Cost Per Page

Combined colors in a single ink cartridge adds up to a higher cost per page, and the Dell AIO 926 Photo is no exception to that rule. Even though Dell has made an effort to keep the price of its cartridges down, their limited capacity increases the cost of operation significantly, with a cost of 51 cents for a 4x6 photo (30% higher than the Canon and Epson models). The price can climb even higher if you use the standard-capacity cartridges; we did our tests with the high-capacity ones.

Scanning And Copying

The copy function was the one pleasant surprise we had with this all-in-one. Due to the good integration of the scanning and printing functions, the Dell AIO 926 Photo can reproduce a black-and-white document in less than 30 seconds, which is an excellent time. However, the quality of the copy will be only average, and you'd do well to use it sparingly for large documents. Paradoxically, scanning was rather slow, especially for previewing 8½x 11 pages, which took more than 10 seconds.