There was an old comic book motif known as "injury-to-eye," utilized heavily in the pulp era of the early 20th century. When you wanted to make the bad guy look really, really BAD, you let him threaten/perform some act against the hero's eyeball...Dave Sim makes note of this in his Cerebus series, and it's used every now and again in more modern pop culture media, such as the (weaker) sequel to "Under Siege."
It seems as if Dell has taken this notion to a new high: I personally WANT to have my eyeball assaulted, horribly and vigorously, rather than have to deal with this particular product.
That is quite an accomplishment.
I should have known it was going to be a bad experience. I got the printer for "free," when I got my Inspiron 1300, to replace my Inspiron 1100, which I'd also hated. In fact, I'd vowed never to purchase another Dell product, but I was on deadline for a book, and the 1100 had fried itself, so I was betwixt a rock and a hard place, and panicked. I will write that Epinion someday...someday when I can consider doing so, and not crying.
So the Dell Authorized Rectum Plunderer in my local area gouged me for the new 1300, and was pleased to tell me he could "give" me the printer. I asked if I could trade the printer for the $75 BIOS-synch fee he was charging, instead, and he said he didn't need any printers. Neither did I, but it was "free," so I took it.
Yeah, well, you know what they say about the value of what you pay for. This product is proof of that adage.
If it had come "free" with some Cracker Jacks, the performance would have been more to my expectations.
First off, it did NOT come with a printer cable. Okay, no big surprise-- many new printers don't. Sure, it's inconvenient, and buying a cable for a printer I didn't need was a bit of an exorbitant expenditure, but the hell, right?
Right.
Then I tried to set the mother up. Of course, every single thing about the product is counterintuitive, but, then, it's a Dell, so who is shocked?
It was not plug-and-play. It did not tell me anything when I connected it. It was not a simple matter of downloading a driver from the Dell website.
No, I had to carve through a bunch of junk on Dell's website to find out this key little piece of info: the product wil NOT function with Windows 98. It is not supported, which means they didn't even build a driver for it. I even tried XP's "pretend to be 98" function, with no joy.
Yes, 98 may be obsolete, but it's what I choose to run on one of my machines, and I'm the customer. Shut up, Dell.
Okay-- I'll move printers, and use it with one of my machines that runs XP. Fine.
Except you can't download the driver for XP, either. Nope. You have to order the freaking CD.
No kidding. Really.
So I had to wait a couple of weeks to get the stupid thing in the mail. Which was making the whole experience very annoying.
Then it came, and I installed it. Or, rather, I should say: it insinuated itself all over my hard drive.
The Dell printer driver is a nasty, insidious little varmint, much more similar to a virus than anything else. It puts a host of shortcuts on the Desktop, and other sundry places; it slaps itself into the device tray. It gives you a lot of worse-than-useless functions that hog disk space and bandwidth, and basically eats your computer from the inside.
Then I used it. What a treat.
The Dell driver is even more fun when put into operation. Unlike any other printer I've ever had or used, this one seems to have a need to act like a popup...no-- it IS a popup. I go to print a page (from word processor, web, whatever) and the Dell Printing Center opens, then shows me the "progress" of the print job. This goes beyond annoying, and into Downright Bonking Me Senseless. It takes away my capability to actually conduct any useful activity while I am printing something, thus rendering Windows utterly impotent and useless.
Have I mentioned I hate this device? Oh, I so do.
It gets better-- after all this, the printer also sucks rocks. I mean it. I spent a good hour refining the settings, and playing with alternatives, and the thing still dispenses sheets of paper that look very much like the toilet tissue chunks found on the floors of this nation's worse gas stations. Totally illegible when ink exists, but faded more often than not, with blurs and spots and splatters and a myriad of other print-killers.
And the toner is expensive. Yes, it is.
This is supposed to be a photo-quality machine, and I instead end up with a page of text that is ruined when I try to print one line in red. Gak.
Oh-- I almost forgot to add (in this litany of Why This Product Sucks): it is slow. Slow, slow, slow. And, hey-- I'm not in a great big hurry...check out my handle on this site. But man, this thing is SLOW. Ugly slow. Really.
There is one, and only one good thing I can say about this product: the Uninstall function on the software seems to work quickly, efficiently, and with a great deal of efficacy.
Take this product from me now. Else I will be forced to jab my eye with a geometry compass.
If you like this review, you may want to check out my book, available for pre-order at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/1001-Things-Do-You-Dare/dp/1598691201/ref=sr_11_1/002-3020328-5072004
Create impressive-looking documents in color or black and white with the Dell Color Printer 720. This printer produces professional looking brochures,...More at eBay
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