An excellent budget laser printer

For years I'd been using an ink jet printer to produce letters, and other text output. But the printer takes an age to print each page, the ink costs a fortune and the ink smears if it comes into contact with moisture. And it was forever suffering blockages, requiring cleaning cycles, wasting most of the ink. So I bought a Samsung laser printer. It comes with a toner cartridge ready installed, and took me nor more than 5 minutes to set up.

The only unusual point to note is that it does not come with a USB cable, though these are available for $10 or less. Maybe Samsung think that most people already have a cable, which in my case is true.

The printer has an on/off switch at the back, and takes less than a minute to warm up. Samsung claim 22 pages per minute and I so no reason to doubt that claim. It is certainly very fast and more than adequate for home use. The output quality is first rate, and the equal of the expensive laser printer I use at work.

The supplied printer driver allows for a range of printing options. Economy mode uses less ink, but in my opinion the print quality suffers too much, as it is too light. There is a manual duplex mode (see later), and it can print multiple pages per sheet. I usually print double sided and two pages per sheet, and the results are excellent. The printer dialog also allows selection of the media type, including thick paper, card, and envelope. Default resolution is 600 DPI, but 1200 DPI can be selected. I see no point as 600 DPI is excellent. It can also print a watermark. For example, "Top Secret" can appear on each page to make sure no-one reads the secret documents!!!!

It does not have true duplex, but there is a simple duplex function. All you do is print the document with double sided selected, then when it has printed all odd numbered pages, you take the output, and put it back in to the paper tray, and it will print the even numbered pages. This is more than adequate for home use, but not for an office with multiple users, as a duplex document will block the printing until the owner feeds the pages back in.

In terms of appearance the printer is fine. It is no work of art, but then again neither is it ugly. It is made from cream coloured plastic, and is attractive in an industrial way, and it looks well made. It is not small, but not really bigger than any of the competing products. Don't forget that the paper tray sticks out of the front of the device, so it will take a bit more room than you might think.

Overall I am very pleased with this printer. It is incredibly cheap to buy, easy to set up, easy to use, and the printing is very fast, and high quality. What more could you want?