Text looked dark charcoal rather than black, but it was mostly crisp. Color photos printed on plain paper, on the other hand, looked washed-out and grainy; the same images appeared smooth and natural on Dell's own glossy paper. Scans and copies were good.

The standard-size, Series 21 cartridges run $16 for 180 pages of black and $20 for 170 pages of color (in a trichamber cartridge). That's a pricey 8.9 cents per black page, and 20.7 cents per four-color page. The Series 24 high-yield ink cartridges cost $24 for 500 pages of black and $38 for 500 pages of color--a tolerable 4.8 cents per black page and 12.4 cents per four-color page. While your mileage may vary, it's obvious which size of inks is the better deal.

One area in which Dell shines is recycling: The company will recycle the printer for free and provide envelopes for shipping back spent cartridges.

While the V715w is a pretty good product overall, a rockier-than-usual review experience dampened our enthusiasm for it. Our original review unit's printhead didn't work, nor did the one on a replacement unit. Dell noted that both of those units had been used in previous reviews, and that they may have been mishandled along the way; however, the company also acknowledged that the cause might have been a printhead manufacturing problem, which Dell has since fixed. The third review unit we received was brand-new. Its printhead worked fine, but a newly inserted ink tank produced streaks until we performed a couple of head cleanings. Dell told us that any streaking should be temporary. We also somehow managed to loosen a gasket sealing the tank to the printhead, causing the ink to stop flowing. Dell says that this problem has not been widely reported among its users.

The Dell V715w offers a good feature set and decent performance, but it's overshadowed by similarly priced competition, including the , the , and the . The ink pricing and the functional issues we encountered also make us cautious about recommending this product.