Dell 3330DN Laser Printer Problems

[peterb]

FWIW I had a bad experience with a Kyocera colour printer aimed at office/medium duty use. It didn't seem particularly robust and had a problem soon after purchase that was fixed on site. It was OK for a couple of years, then became more unreliable. And that was bought on the basis I had previously owned a Kyocera monochrome laser that was solid, heavy and just kept on going.

On the other hand I have a Brother monochrome MFC that has been very good, and not too expensive, either to buy or run, and I also have a Lexmark for the occasional colour job. Cheap to buy, but consumables are expensive. It seems reasonably well made, but only gets very light duty use, and I think cost around £100.

On the basis of this (ridiculously small sample!), I'm not sure that it is worth spending a lot of money on an expensive printer for home use unless it has a set of features you can't do without, or it gets a lot of use. Better to buy something cheaper and be prepared to replace it if/when it fails. The other option for the heavy home/home office user is to lease with an inclusive maintenance contract, which then becomes a business expense that you factor in to to your overheads.

[watercooled]

When I run into issues like these that are unusual to the printer I put my laptop on and test to rule out local equipment, you got a laptop to try instead of the main PC?

I definitely tried over USB with the CD drivers but it's worth a go with the updates ones I guess. I have tried with two computers over LAN though with no improvement.

FWIW I had a bad experience with a Kyocera colour printer aimed at office/medium duty use. It didn't seem particularly robust and had a problem soon after purchase that was fixed on site. It was OK for a couple of years, then became more unreliable. And that was bought on the basis I had previously owned a Kyocera monochrome laser that was solid, heavy and just kept on going.

On the other hand I have a Brother monochrome MFC that has been very good, and not too expensive, either to buy or run, and I also have a Lexmark for the occasional colour job. Cheap to buy, but consumables are expensive. It seems reasonably well made, but only gets very light duty use, and I think cost around £100.

On the basis of this (ridiculously small sample!), I'm not sure that it is worth spending a lot of money on an expensive printer for home use unless it has a set of features you can't do without, or it gets a lot of use. Better to buy something cheaper and be prepared to replace it if/when it fails. The other option for the heavy home/home office user is to lease with an inclusive maintenance contract, which then becomes a business expense that you factor in to to your overheads.

Yeah like I say I wouldn't normally avoid a brand because of a fault because of the insignificance of it statistically. I had a string of bad luck with Kingston - a fairly new USB drive just bricked, two CF cards (one then its RMA replacement) were corrupting photos and some RAM I bought caused BSODs and failed memtest, but unless there's good reason to believe there's something statistically wrong with the brand I wouldn't avoid them in future.

It just seems more like design/programming flaws rather than manufacturing faults with this printer, which I admit does seem strange and PEBKAC is definitely a possibility.

With regard to price I got the printer for <£100 as it was on sale anyway, and then there was a cashback deal on top of that. In fact I was actually looking for toner for my Canon printer and that showed up as cheaper than the replacament toner, plus the toner in this Dell printer is AFAIK a full one with a higher capacity than the Canon cartridges!

[watercooled]

Just a quick thread revival since I know you're all itching to know how it's going!

I'm *this* close to binning the thing. I was hoping I'd at least make it through the supplied toner, but despite upgrading my PC and moving to Windows 10 it's exactly the same; default driver is painfully slow and the non-XL driver I manually installed crashes constantly, needing a reboot to fix. I don't think they've actually bothered updating the drivers at all though. I guess I got what I paid for in this case (basically free)!

Might just bite the bullet and get a replacement toner cartridge for my old 6650dn (which is still getting driver updates from Canon!) which was rock solid.

And the Dell seems to keep randomly spitting toner powder out. And it smells really strongly when it prints. And it's big. And it takes ages to boot.

[Kumagoro]

I think we had the 3330 at work and it seemed to work fine.although a new replacement imaging unit had banding a couple of times. Print speed was okay.

If the driver is still on the server I will look to see which one it is. If I remember that is, I have the memory of a sieve.

[watercooled]

Oh that might be worth a look, thanks!

This is the one I'm using: http://www.dell.com/support/home/uk/...3330dn/drivers (the one under Drivers for OS Deployment called Dell_3330_ACI_Admin.exe)

It contains three drivers, a 'plain' one, an XL one (default) and another one (PostScript if memory serves me correctly). The default XL one is slow, so I chose the 'plain' one which does work seemingly OK, but like I say crashes frequently, regardless of what PC I try it on.

As I think I mentioned earlier in the thread I've tried different driver versions and even Lexmark drivers and none work correctly so far for various reasons.

[watercooled]

I've been using the latest version of the 'Open print driver' for a while now and it seems more reliable so far. It lacks a few features from the control panel and tends to cut off headers/footers (I might need to adjust the margins somehow), but it at least works.

[Kumagoro]

I have just remembered about this while at the work and I took a look at the server.... My colleague has deleted it.

You may already know of it but check out ftp.dell.com if there is anything dell you want it is there... usually.

http://downloads.dell.com/published/...ll-3330dn.html


It has current and past firmware and drivers.

[watercooled]

Yeah the latest one there is the one I was using unfortunately. The open ones I switched to are a bit better but I think I'll just use up the toner and give the printer away.