The same could be said for the 5 per cent text document. There was no colour bleeding and street names were about as readable as on other printers here. However, Dell intended users to print letters, web pages and other colour documents on the 720, and our Streetmap colour page on plain paper wasn’t noticeably worse than others. That’s enough time to print seven A4 photos on the HP Deskjet 5940. It took a mind-numbing nine minutes simply to churn out a single 6 x 4in print at best quality and a foot-tapping 25 minutes, 24 seconds to print our A4 photo montage. But another reason not to print photos is speed. Even from a foot away, grain is easily visible and is enough on its own to ruin colour and mono prints. And we can see why Dell didn’t want to advertise the 720 as a photo printer – the quality falls well short of the other budget printers.
The 720 is the only printer that doesn’t support borderless printing, so 6 x 4in and A4 images emerged with 5mm white borders around them. It was odd to see that ‘print a photo’ was one of the options, so naturally we had to try it out.
This is no bad thing, as it’s task driven you select what kind of document you want to print and all the settings are made for you – paper type, size and layout.
Installing the two cartridges is easy and, not surprisingly, the driver is virtually identical to Lexmark’s, simply with a few Dell logos dotted around.
It weighs next to nothing and all you get in the box is a slot-in PSU (like the Lexmark’s), a power cable, driver CD and manual. Like the Canon iP2200 and Lexmark Z735, the 720 is a very basic inkjet. These two are intended for printing text documents and the occasional colour document, even if Dell’s documentation and driver mistakenly refers to the 720 as the ‘Photo Printer 720’. The 720 is one of only two inkjets on test that can’t officially print photos – Lexmark’s Z735 is the other.