If you purchase the standard-size (series 31) or high-yield (series 32) ink supplies for the V525W, the per-page color costs are exorbitant. All in all, the quality of the output is this MFP’s major selling point. Photos look sharp and vivid, though just a tad oversaturated. Text and monochrome graphics appear black and sharp, though we noticed some defects in one solid-gray area on our formatted “newsletter” text sample. Printing a full-page photo took a little over 2 minutes, and copies exited at 2 ppm. Snapshot-size (4-by-6-inch) photos printed to plain paper at 2 ppm printing to glossy paper was only slightly slower at 1.6 ppm. That’s the widest gap we’ve seen in a while. Printing the same documents on the Mac platform was significantly slower, operating at a rate of just 3.8 ppm.

In our tests, the V525W was decently fast on the PC, printing monochrome pages at 7.2 pages per minute. The unit also offers no manual setup for the Wi-Fi you must use WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) or configure it while the MFP is attached via USB. Instead, you must set the printer for the type of paper being used, and the tray will “automatically” follow your lead. Another example: In the printer driver, the ‘Automatic’ setting in the paper type drop-down menu doesn’t mean what we thought (namely, that the printer could sense the paper type loaded and adjust print quality automatically). Once we returned to the main menu, the setup process-as well as the print, copy, and scan jobs-commenced. For starters, since the operating panel overrides all other functions, our innocent attempt to browse a submenu prevented the unit from responding to the software setup or incoming jobs. Overall, the V525W is a solid product, but its firmware and controls are slightly backward.

Less forgivable is the need to buy the extra-high-yield supplies to keep ink costs even close to reasonable.

This MFP also has an automatic duplexer to ease two-sided printing chores. Photos appear extremely vivid, and text looks sharp and black. One look at the output of the $130 (as of August 21, 2012) Dell V525W color inkjet multifunction, and you’ll willingly forgive some of its rough edges.

Dell e525w color printer in stock