The LBP3370 Laser Printer from Canon carries a substantial price tag will not be immediately obvious from the exterior of the machine. You of course will find a mono LCD, but this apart; there is hardly any hint of sophistication to boast of.  First, a look at the highs and lows of the LBP3370 before we get into its design and performance aspects.

Pros:

• Good print quality
• Reasonable running costs
• Economical & effective for strong black & white prints

Cons:

• High price tag

Features:

To start with, the casing of the Canon i-Sensys LBP3370 Laser Printer is not much polished or in any other way indicative of the high price tag. Do not be taken by surprise, as the i-SENSYS LBP3370 is tagged more of a printer built for the office environment and therefore has nothing much of a say on the aesthetic value. As for its size, the printer measures 399.7mm (W) x 378.6mm (D) x 267mm (H) and weighs 12.2kg.

Maximum Sheet Capacity: The paper inputs comprise a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray and can stretch a 250 sheet cassette. The output is a little under 125 pages. Mind you these are not outstanding numbers for a print output, but you obviously have the choice of upgrading the input capacity to 550 sheets using an optional tray. As a user, you might expect the output to be a tad higher on a model which promises a lot better for large-print jobs. In a way though, that may be missing the point of the i-SENSYS LBP3370.

PCL5e/6 support: What the Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 ought to give to the user is functionality and here the results look pretty convincing. The integration of a 10Base-T/100Base-TX interface and some useful management software allows it to slip into any office network like a dream. There isn’t any wireless connection, but to be honest, we are nowhere close to the time when the typical office workhorse fiddles with the somewhat inconsistent Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards. Besides 64MB of RAM, you have PCL5e/6 support that makes its way seamlessly into present-day PCL printing environments. Furthermore, Canon’s printer language Plus UFRII gives you reasonably good processing speed for faster output of text documents.

Easy network connectivity: The i-SENSYS LBP3370 has a built-in network interface which facilitates connection to your office network. There is a Remote User Interface which lets users view the machine status and oversee print jobs right from their web browser. Furthermore, administrators will be easily able to control the machine settings.

Easy All-in-One cartridge: The All-in-One cartridge is a brilliant inclusion, in that it could cut down the maintenance cost without any compromise on the output. All you need to do is replace the compact cartridge containing the drum, toner and cleaning units and the machine is about as good as new.

Performance:

No warm-up time: Most printers (including the ones we have tested on our website) come with quick speeds when warmed up. But should you need to print off a load in a jiffy, you have to play the waiting game as they take some time off to constantly warm up. The Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 does really well and has a reputation for its zero warm up time. Thanks to its On-Demand fixing technology, the time taken for the ‘First Print Out Time’ is a mere 6.5 seconds. And there always, you have the advantage of quiet operation with most Canon printers. Talking about the energy efficiency of the i-SENSYS LBP3370, it makes use of only 5W in sleep mode, which is extremely good under any standards.

Print speeds: In practise, the i-SENSYS LBP3370 was able to print in less than 6 seconds and in our recent observations, it spurred into action almost in a flash. It still does not hit the 26ppm (pages per minute) mark, as quoted by the manufacturer. But at 22.2ppm, it came closer to the on-paper figure then is usually is the case. The Canon’s non-existent warm-up period can prove so crucial in a business environment where there is a beeline for running off little print jobs as fast as possible.
Print Quality: The Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 boasts a professional print output with clear graphics and sharp text, courtesy its resolution of up to 2400 x 600dpi.  When you make out a comparison with slightly cheaper mono laser printers including Epson AcuLaser M2000D (as an example), the print quality is far better. Being a mono model, in all probability, you will not go for it essentially for its graphic output, though it is pretty competent here too, which we noticed in our series of complicated photograph tests.

Lower paper costs: With the Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370, you can enjoy significant cost advantages when it comes to paper input. The fast, built-in automatic double-sided printing deserves mention as the resultant document and booklet are nothing short of excellence.

Warranty details:

The Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 is covered under one year onsite warranty which commences from the date of purchase.

Verdict:

Recommended by BLI (Buyers Laboratory Inc.) for its performance and features, the Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 has all the ingredients of a rock-solid laser printer such that dynamic workgroups would love to have in their scheme of things. And not to mention the printer’s ideal mix of performance with clear print quality, which clearly has a cut above the rest. The price of the printer however, is a certain put off. We understand that the price tag is well over £300, and guess what; you could have gone for a decent colour printer in that price range. The running cost is pretty decent and the LBP3370 is a strong contender if you need to pick an effective and economical machine. But just at a time, when the cost of mono laser models has hit an all time low, we are not sure if the Canon i-SENSYS LBP3370 is sufficiently feature laden to justify that exorbitant price tag.

Check other Latest Laser Printers in this website.

Canon i-Sensys LBP3370 Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

What is hot?

• Decent performance level
• Easy to replace paper and toner due to its size
• Pretty light on toner use
• Interface with SEOSX is perfect
• Low cost per page
• Reasonably good print quality
• Easy to use & intuitive copy, print and fax functions
• Printing is fast and much accurate when it comes to page count
• Beeping sound could be disabled when you are out of paper and opening a draw

What is not?

• Bit noisy and little big
• Set up instructions are not very clear
• Scanning on OSX seems like it needs direct connection to the PC
• Does not feed cardstock that is used for reminders (but then neither will any of the other Dell printers!)
• Scanning is relatively slow at roughly 10-12ppm
• Scanning produces huge files that are nearly 10 times bigger than the 1815DN

Features:

There is a gamut of styles one can go for when it comes to the design of a multifunction printer. Choices do vary and Dell seems like they have gone for the traditional ‘Le Corbusier tank’ look. What makes us say this? Just take a look at the blackish 2335DN and you will know why. The printer is monolithically square cut and not to mention the rectangular apertures and clean diagonals. The 2335DN is basically a black and white MFL printer built with a fax machine. It is marked by a traditional look with a black plastic and boxy shape. Take a look at its striking size which makes a bit of an impression. The multi function printer can fit more at home than at large offices and it is recommended even if you have a small team of staff than at home. The ADF looks more like a tower and add to this, a set of caterpillar tracks on the base of the printer and you have all the makings of a frightening bit of office munitions. Weighing 17.7kg, it is not often you see a bigger machine for a mono laser printer at a dimension of 46.5cm (W) x 44cm (D) x 46.1cm (H).

Interface: The interface of the machine is a let down because we had to make the same selection over again for scanning a second time, though it asks over when you are done with your scanning if you need to scan again. Nonetheless, you need to be really quick, or else it will beep at you indicating ‘scanner busy’. One thing we hate is to press a hell lot of buttons for doing one thing. And not to mention the 3-4 several arrows keys you need to enter, simply to get to where the fax number is entered. The number buttons are not good either and they respond very slowly and need a heavy bit of touch. We tried entering fax number too quickly just to find it misses a few numbers.

Control panel: The control panel of the 2335DN Laser Printer is perfectly clean cut, comprising 5-button cross of controls at the back meant for Start, job Cancel and the remaining three is intended for menu exit.  The greenish Start button is more obvious and much larger in size. Coming to the controls involving fax operation, you may find a numeric pad that helps dial fax numbers and there are a number of buttons that helps call up the fax directory and unusually to pause into a fax number. On the front panel of the machine there is a USB port which allows you to print regular graphic file types including .jpg, .tif, .bmp and .pdf, all with a USB drive. The printer does not have Wi-Fi and there is the internal USB wireless adaptor (optional) which allows you to print from literally anywhere in your office without requiring any cables.

Paper handling: The Automatic document feeder could accept up to 50 sheets. The end of the machine’s feed tray is nicely hinged, therefore one could tilt it up for removing scanned images. The paper tray of the printer is built to hold 250 sheets, in addition to the multi-purpose tray of 50 sheets which folds down pretty easily from the front of the printer. We had no trouble folding down the complete front of the machine and the toner cartridge for the drum showed up instead of just the printer’s multi-purpose tray. We felt it would have been very useful had it got an interlock.

The extra paper tray does not seem like it would work for envelopes. It is rather good if it is to hold extra paper of the same type like the paper in tray 1. You can configure the multi function printer for envelope use, but then what else can you use for unless you configure the additional button every time and the case is the same with copies.

OS Support: The 2335DN Mono Laser Printer is compatible with Mac, Linux and Windows. The print driver had issues with compatibility with Word 2007, if customer reviews are any indication.

Installation: Talk about the installation and it is as simple as pie! How do you go about the set up? Strange enough, you need to connect both USB cables and power between the printer and PC, before you run the setup routine. Thankfully, both Postscript drivers as well as a PCL are supplied by Dell for this printer, although both of these are in printer emulation. You may also find Nuance PaperPort (a copy of it) for handling OCR and scanning. This software also lets you archive documents efficiently and quickly. The machine is completely networked off the shelf and is integrated with the Dell’s net configuration utility that is web-based. And with this you will have no real problem setting up the printer for sharing it across the Ethernet link.

Performance:

Print speeds: Dell claims a maximum print speed of 32ppm, but on testing, we found it was way short of the speed it claims as it took more than 10 seconds, in fact 19 seconds to be precise for printing a five-page text print and the equivalent speed generated is 15.8ppm. We stepped up the page run to 20 pages to record a print speed of 25.5ppm. We had to admit that this in no way is closer to the rated speed, but it is fairly decent for a printer that carries a price tag of about £250. The quoted speeds are that of the single-sided printing speed. Try printing a text document duplex of 20 sides, it takes about 15spm (sides per minutes) or 1:20, and this is generally because of the little pause when you are printing between each page’s first and second side.

The automatic double-sided printing mode is not quick either, though it still managed a swift 14.4 ppm. When the machine is relatively warmed up, you can see the first page popping out at 8 seconds and that is good by any standards. When the machine is on standby mode for sometime, you still have to wait for 23 seconds and this by no means is poor. It is only after you turn the printer off and switch it back on again that it makes you wait for long. Time taken for the first page is 50 seconds. So we do have to say the measured times are slightly above average in comparison with other machines on the market.

Printing Quality: When it comes to printing quality, the manufacturer with its print driver claims a 600 x 600 dpi resolution for producing professional quality graphics with jagged detail. Now whether the software provided plays a role in enhancing the resolution is not obvious. Take for the photo print samples, which were chalk and cheese, no matter what resolution we selected. And again the random toner spatter spoils the party, which we suppose was the dubious toner cartridge and printer drum.

Digging deeper into it, we found a nice, deep black and sharp individual characters. Also discernible are the edges of few letters, which is a little bit of staircase effect. The bars in the chart have gradients which are clearly illustrated in the graph. If not, the text is clean and stands out pretty well on a B & W background. The nicely reproduced contrast deserves appreciation. The 2335DN’s functionality makes it a clear choice in workplaces, if it was not for its printing foibles. There was a column of dots that are evenly spaced down the right side of the page. We suppose this has more to do with the slight defect on the cartridge’s drum (a brand-new one!), however the warranty allows you to get it replaced in no time.

And not to forget the miss-feeds. During our tests, we noted 2 double-sheet feeds and this generally is two more than what other multi-function and laser printers are built with. Then finally coming to taking out photocopies of the graphics and text test page, which is the usual ‘test copying’ routine on multi-function printers, it  gave out irregular and banded grey patterning with a fair amount of  dark background tones and this made our life difficult when reading the black text that is being printed over them. These copies are not at all usable. Overall, the printer’s reasonable good print quality is not consistent over photocopied documents. There is way too much of contrast and here the chart had different lines that are virtually invisible, though we found the text legible.

Cost per page:  What is the source for getting the consumables for this printer? It is Dell alone which will cost you a £53 for the 6000-page, cartridge’s high-yield version and guess what, the print costs is rated at 1.7p/page which still challenges to be the lowest possible page cost for a laser printer at this buying price, given that black and white printers itself would cost you about 2.2 p per page on an average. Go for a high capacity cartridge, you may see the cost still coming down to a mere 1.15 p.
Energy Consumption: The machine consumes 80W when it is on standby mode for an extended period. And this for all intents and purposes, is particularly high for a machine that is doing nothing. When it is in the printing mode, the number escalates to 450W on an average with stark contrast to an inkjet printer which requires only about 20W. We were not able to find an option for disabling the power saving mode.  And so any sort of efforts to fax or copy anything from it after setting the machine in the ideal state for 60 minutes or more will require the unit to warm up for 15-20 seconds before you could even set things off.

Noise levels: The Dell 2335DN has turned out to be a pretty loud printer and if our tests are any indication, the machine has a noise level that averages at 62 dB when measured at a distance of 1m in our testing suite.

Go green: ‘Green Printing technology’, an initiative of Dell helps lowers the carbon footprint. The machine is ENERGY STAR complaint and the manufacturer claims that it is at least 25% more efficient than most conventional MFL printers. There is an environmental paper drawer that allows you to make use of recycled paper and encourages re-use of freshly-printed paper sheets. You can automatically reduce multiple pages, printing on one sheet.

Scanner & Copier: Though the 2335DN is capable of printing only in black and white, it could scan in colour. It scans at a decent speed, though it is not the most impressive of scanners. It took about 12 seconds for a preview scan. To scan a 4” x 6” photo, the machine took about 22 seconds. There is nothing special about the quality. We revere the content though the colours are slightly dictated by reds. Scans look pretty sharp and there is detail in plenty. We found that it copies documents fast and in just under 11 seconds it is able to copy a single-page document.

The scanning software is not by any means effective. The real problem lies when you have to interact with the machine. It is hardly unbelievable when you need to click through a lot of menus simply for scanning a document and we would rather appreciate if anyone can help us out in disabling these prompts. And mind you it would still prompt you even though you set the defaults. It is also not easy to get duplex scanning working and we had to make a call to Dell who helped us out in getting it to work in the software.

Fax:  If there is an adjective to describe the performance of the fax, then it should be ‘unreliable’. Thanks to its incapability to do more than a task simultaneously. When you fax a document to a busy number, the scanning, copying and printing functions are virtually rendered unusable unless it has effectively re-faxed the document or has attempted three times and timed out. The fax dial speed might get you in a spot of bother. Anyone who might have used fax machine before will tell you the easiest way to send fax is to simply click a # and then hit send. Strangely enough, it is a lot quicker to simply enter the phone number instead of having to click thorough speed dial menus located on the machine‘s front panel. Another downside is that there is no SSL support whatsoever offered by the scan to email, which most ISP’s now need for SMTP service (sending emails). We also had trouble assigning codes to outgoing faxes.

Recommended by BLI buyers laboratory: The Dell 2335DN was tested at the BLI buyers laboratory, the industry’s top independent authority which provides competitive intelligence, evaluation, reviews and testing on printers, scanners, copiers, multifunction machines and other software products and solutions. Moreover, it has been highly recommended by BLI as a quality MFL printer for the year 2009. There is also a comprehensive, unbiased BLI buyers lab report in the manufacturer’s website that you can go through for an exhaustive evaluation of the printers’ performance.

What is in the box?

• Dell 2335DN Laser Printer
• Installation software
• Instruction manual CD (Printer driver & other software in multiple languages)
• Standard black toner cartridge from Dell 2335DN (3000-page yield, hardware recycle program label, instructions & set-up placemat)

Warranty Details:

The product is covered under the manufacturer’s standard one year limited warranty for hardware in addition to a 1 year warranty for advanced service. For those who like to have increased protection of the machine can go for an optional 5 year extended warranty.
ProSupport Printer Services: This is a value added service from Dell that offers expert technical support from technicians (who are ISF-certified), diagnosis, on-site exchanges and support on 3rd party software, etc.

Verdict:

In terms of value, the 2335DN raises to the occasion as a fabulous workgroup printer for offices, home and small businesses. With the integration of duplex printing capabilities, optional paper drawer and network adaptor, the purchase price of the printer is unsurpassed in the B&W laser machine segment. But label it as a multifunction machine, it falls way behind other machines.  Assuming the dots and spatter observed on the printer pages were cut off to the specific consumables provided with our expert team, the 2335DN is a reasonably good mono laser MF printer.

The printer is nicely specified with standard features including fax, walk-up printing and duplex print built-in functions, however the excessively dark graphics print copies that we were able to produce discounted its very effectiveness in terms of scanning and copying. Whilst the machine is quiet user friendly for the beginner, it is built with its own limitations for use in an advanced small or medium business environment. To wrap up things, we would like to have the following built into the machine in its later releases:

• Standard Paper Input: 500 Sheet Tray
• Optional Envelope feeder option
• Reduced prices on printer toner (6k yield) as the toner cost is a tad higher than the Dell 1815DN

Dell 2335DN Multifunction Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

We are pretty impressed with its high performance printing and the compact design of the printer should offer you a fast, simple and wireless connection. Users may adapt to their workspace without any sort of compromise on the quality of printing. Continue reading the review of the ML-2525W Laser Printer in the following review, but just a quick look at the highs and lows of the machine.

What is hot?

• Reasonably priced
• USB, Ethernet & Wireless connectivity
• Can print high-quality graphics and text
• Smaller footprints

What is not?

• Ships with starter toner cartridge
• Short of autoduplexing
• Pretty small toner capacity

Design features:

Most Mono laser printer models have got a tarnished name for their ‘not too exciting design’ and though the  Samsung ML-2525W Wireless Mono Laser Printer (Model Code: MLT-D1052L/ MLT-D1052S) does not stray  much from the pack, the manufacturer has designed and built several bits and pieces of flair that makes the ML-2525W stand apart from the rest. The physical aspects and features have not changed a lot since the ML-2851ND, except that you can find a smooth black finish, besides, the covering on the top of the machine’s paper tray has a textured check pattern. Somewhere down the way, the manufacturer has managed to reduce the weight to 16.9 lb and that is almost lighter by 9 pounds when compared to the Samsung ML-2851ND. It is a bit smaller and the overall dimension goes like 360mm (W) x 389 mm (D) x 197mm (H). Coming to the output cover, it adds a bit of streamlined look to the machine, in addition to minimising disturbance and keeping the printing noise level fairly down.

Control panel:

The most impressive thing about the printer’s stylish design that it can suit any office environment, besides providing some practical advantages. You may find that the power switch is conveniently placed on the top and this means you will have no trouble turning it on or off. The two LCDs indicate network status and print activity. There is also a switch for cancelling a print job and another button meant for demo print.

Enclosed cassette tray:

The ML-2525W makes use of a cassette-type paper feed system. The printer’s input tray is designed to feed into the machine’s bottom. You can also find the customary manual tray placed just under the tonner-access handle that will allow you to supply single print media sheets directly into the machine.

Sleek exterior:

Another impressive thing when it comes to the design is the stylish streamlined exterior and the design of the machine is such that it can fit perfectly into any sort of professional business adding a touch of style.

Simple & quick wireless connectivity:

Samsung gives you a number of ways for connecting this printer to the machine. On the other side of the machine, there is an USB 2.0 connection port for the purpose of wired access; however you also receive 802.11b/g server meant for wireless network and an Ethernet port for the purpose of wired networking. In all the three methods, you need to link or connect the machine onto USB 2.0 connection initially before you sniff out networks. Did we mention that we had no problem establishing a link to our office’s wireless network making use of the step-by-step instructions on the driver? Samsung’s effort to provide its users, installation to hassle-free wireless connectivity is appreciable considering that it consumes only up to 30 minutes. But the ML-2525W makes use of a high speed connection providing all its users a single step process of installation in about 5 minutes. Not to mention that any installation process allows users in setting up the wireless printer efficiently and quickly.

Simple set-up:

Setting up with Mac:

We had no problem installing the machine to notebook with XP Pro. But having said that, Samsung should have been focussed on the installation instructions. The installation sequence is indicated with basic diagrams and theoretically should be simple stuff. If you are engulfed with any problem of getting the wireless connected, you may refer to the instructions as provided in the Samsung’s website. Though we had this printer up and running for several hours, our immediate impressions are that it is a little, great printer. We had users having concerns over using it with a Mac, but we had no trouble whatsoever. We had a MacBook Pro running 10.6.4 and setting up via WiFi or USB. At first, we plugged it directly into a USB port and the Mac was able to download driver and we were up and away in a couple of minute’s time.
For linking it to our home wireless network, we made use of the installation disc, following the instructions for establishing a wireless network. Having set it up on the Mac, setting up on the other Macs was pretty simple and straight forward. We then found the printer making use of the Print & Fax from System Preference. If you are a Mac user running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, connecting the printer via USB is simple enough. When you switch the printer on, Snow Leopard would automatically ask you if you want to install and download the suitable drivers (the machine’s specific model was automatically recognised). On doing so, the printer at once was available as a local printer and we did not need the driver CD.

Wi-Fi setup:

For Wi-Fi set up, we made use of the Wi-Fi Setup utility from the driver CD for selecting the Wi-Fi network and then enter the required password. The default configuration of the printer is linked to an access point and you will get an IP address through DHCP that worked absolutely fine and you also do not have to tweak any of it. There was a certain delay initially when you are waiting for the Wi-Fi utility to end; however we resolved it by simultaneously adding the printer through Bonjour on the iMac (System Preference -> Print & Fax).  The machine was available wirelessly and we chose to share the machine via the iMac and it was immediately available to all the machines on the local network, without any need for further configuration. The complete process from taking out the printer from the box to printing test pages consumed only about 15 minutes.

For AirPrint support:

For AirPrint support, we utilized Printopia, a third party utility (again on the iMac) which enables the printer or any other that are available wirelessly for printing from iOS devices (iPhones, iPads and iPod touches making use of the iOS 4.2 or later). This machine does not provide support AirPrint natively (only particular latest HP models at the time of writing). However Printopia lets you to slightly enable AirPrint for any machine that your Mac recognises, in addition to this one.

USB installation:

First, the USB installation is pretty lightweight. Secondly, the printer is set to use DHCP by default. This really is an issue for most of the users as there will be a change in the address on the network. The driver installation on client PC’s hard-wires into the set-up of the current IP address during the installation. The result obviously is that the moment you reboot the printer, the printer would no longer work and this is not at all smart. The obvious fix of assigning a static address and putting into port configuration on client machines is perhaps beyond the skill capability of most home users.

Once you set off things, you may access function, paper size, toggling auto-duplexing (helps to print on both the sides of the paper sheet), besides several other normal settings via the general settings or you could change the intricate option via the print driver menu including the print resolution (up to 1200 dpi maximum resolution), toner darkness, network information, security and lots more. A modest status monitor is automatically installed into your Windows taskbar; however it does not show up the status/progress of job or alert the users when the consumables of printer are running low.

Another downside to the use of ML-2525W Monochrome Laser Printer is the cost of consumables. The manufacturer provides an affordable cartridge of high-capacity which according to Samsung would last for 2500 pages, but one should do note that the Samsung ML-2525W is shipped with a ‘Starter Toner Cartridge’ of 1000 pages, a tricky cut that will persuade you to shell out more money on printer consumables sooner than you actually know it and that again depends on the standard print volume.

AnyWeb Print:

AnyWeb Print from Samsung is an easy and quick way of gathering web information together. This software helps you choose, drag and drop content from several web pages into a blank, new page on your screen. This helps you save this page as a pdf or print or tiff file.

Excellent Performance:

Printing speed:

The Samsung ML-2525W Laserjet Printer is not the flashiest of printers on the market, however it surely has set the pace for several other monochrome laser printers when you take into account output quality and print speed. It is perhaps not often you see a machine crank out graphics, text, besides PowerPoint presentations, all at the similar speed, though the ML-2525W is able to maintain a reliable 20 pages/min all together which gives the same amount of speed as that of the Samsung ML-2851ND.  On the other hand, Samsung claims the printer to have been built with a FPOT (First Page Out Time) of 9 seconds, in addition to a 24-page per minute (ppm) print speed which is reasonably good under any standards. The sleek and compact design is integrated with a 250-sheet cassette input capacity and this means you do not have to spend more time on replenishing paper. The monthly duty cycle of 12000 sheets comes in quite handy for a small office environment.

Average cartridge yield:

It will be pretty interesting to see how closer it will get to the 1000 pages with the cartridge supplied by the manufacturer. If you are not a heavy user, we believe it should last for a while. Again if you are fed up with the unreasonable price of the Canon MP640 (a great printer though) and at the same time if you are a low volume user, you will end up using up a remarkable amount of ink via the print head clean cycles and this is a real waste of time when you are basically printing out monochrome documents. The wastage can be reduced with the ML-2525W.

Print quality:

The print quality of the ML-2525W is pretty good with a satisfactory warm-up time from a cold start and is slightly fainter when you are using Toner Save. Like most of the mono laser printers, the text quality results of the Samsung are excellent with bold fonts having even thickness, dark lines, besides large lettering. If you navigate through the print driver, you will find several options for printing all the text to black and darkening it and the printer does exactly what it says. They enable the machine to make the dark text and lines even darker, increasing solid characters for added emphasis which you can find right throughout the page, particularly on larger blocks of black colour.

The ML-2525W is an improvisation on the earlier iterations that did struggle a bit with graphic documents that were tested. The test page from the ML-2525W has fine movement from black-to-white gradations and the good thing is that it is well within the varying degrees of shading. We do not look forward to many users going for the mono laser version for photographs; however our samples comprising detailed images are pretty satisfactory particularly for use in a professional environment.

Service & Support:

Samsung offers toll-free technical support and its Online Support Centre provides an FAQ, how-to-guide, in addition to software downloads including manuals, firmware upgrades and manuals.

What is in the box?

• Samsung ML-2525
• 700 pages Black Toner Cartridge
• CD/DVD (Utilities/Software/User Manuals/Drivers)
• Setup & Installation Guide

Manufacturer warranty:

The ML-2525W is supported by Samsung with a limited warranty of one year.

Conclusion:

The Samsung ML-2525W mono laser printer is not packed with extra features. However, it gives you appreciable improvements over its predecessors in terms of quality and output speed. With lower noise levels less than 51dBA, the wireless installation was up and running, through the CD download for installing multiple languages. If you are someone who is ready to sacrifice quality for the sake of quantity, then you should have no problem going for this wireless workhorse!

Check all Latest Laser Printers,  other Samsung Laser Printers Reviews in this website.

Samsung ML-2525W Manual Duplex Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Monochrome laser printer:

The HP LaserJet Pro P1102W (product code: CE657A) is a basic monochrome laser printer built with a few surprises, namely Wi-Fi and print speeds that seem better than you would have expected. As a matter of disappointment, its rather expensive toner offsets its quite affordable machine cost. The HP laser printer comes with very modest dimensions; basically its input and output trays fold out only when it is required. This laser printer is an entry-level, multifunction Wi-Fi black and white printer for the home and it guarantees print speeds of 18 pages per minute. The printer size can remind you of the ML-1660, which is particularly impressive for its quick ‘print screen’ button. A standard 802.11b/g wireless (including USB) offers a nice lift to an otherwise normally configured low-end laser printer.

Small & compact:

Small, compact and pretty cheap, this new PRO P1102W HP laser printer is built keeping the varied needs of home users and small work groups in mind. Measuring just 349 mm (W) x 238 mm (D) x 196 mm (H) in size, it weighs only 5.3 kg and should be perfect if space is at a premium. Decked out completely in an all-black chassis having a glossy front panel, the machine looks quite attractive.

Hardware features:

The 150-sheet input tray could fold down itself from the front panel of the machine where it seems to be a little out of place and you will find that the paper stop can slide out to the machine’s front and help keep the output documents neat. Whenever there is a paper in the input tray, you have to have a small flap at the machine’s front open. This seems to end up making it a bit messy, though unlike on other printer models, we have seen the flab is somewhat securely attached and should therefore be able to take a few knocks from passers-by.

The top panel of the HP Laserjet PRO P1102W Wireless Laser Printer is designed with a textured black insert, whilst the surround is simply high-gloss black plastic having a little control panel down the left side, plus indicators for wireless connection, two buttons, one for wireless and the other for job cancel, in addition to errors and power. The two buttons of the control panel and three LED’s all come with icons, but has no word icons and this means you have to check their meaning in the documentation that is HTML based which to its credit has appreciable animated translations of the LED sequences.

You may find that the blue wireless indicator tends to go off when the machine switches to ‘sleep’ mode and that is illogical because the printer would not wake to print ink if it finds the link still inactive. Most of the wireless printers tend to leave the connection light in the ‘ON’ state, even when sleeping.

Paper handling:

The 150-sheet main input area is a foldout front panel instead of a full-fledged tray having sliding width guides. There is a 10-sheet priority feeder for special media or envelope that is brilliantly positioned above the main tray and this is pretty unusual in a printer at this end of the market.  The machine is also built with manual-feed slot for thicker form of media. The top-loading output tray is built with the capacity to hold 125 sheets. Though these parts have been impressively built and are sturdy, you will find that their markings that are stamped into the black plastic without any contrasting colour and are almost difficult to decipher. There is also the manual duplexing that is present on both Mac and PC with useful on-screen prompts. There is a small cut-out at the back of the left-hand side panel that could take a USB cable and if you intend to make use of the printer through Wi-Fi, a temporary USB connection is essential.

Setting up the printer:

Setting up the machine is a breeze. The drum and toner cartridge is small and discreet that slots rather deep into the bowels of the machine. You can access the toner cartridge by lifting the top cover of the printer. Rated at 1600 pages, you will find this to be the only consumable in the machine and can be fitted easily. Thanks to the easy step-by-step guide in the printer’s instruction manual as we did not face any problem when setting up the printer.

USB & wireless connections:

The Laserjet PRO P1102W printer is provided with both USB & wireless connections. If you go for the latter, you still have to connect the USB cable temporarily for configuring the wireless setting. Impressively, the HP has a USB cable in the package. We were a bit disappointed to find out that HP has only seen fit to integrate the LaserJet P1102w with 802.11b/g wireless, given that most businesses and homes now make use of the far-reaching 802.11n wireless standard. You are also not provided with the wired Ethernet option, which is a shame.

Operating system:

HP gives you 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for Windows Vista, Windows XP and OS X from version 10.4. There is also a Linux driver that is available for download and other than these, there is not much that you can say about other available software.

Printing Speed:

HP has rated this laser printer at 18ppm, which is comparatively good speed for a personal laser printer. Printing a 5-page text took 27s and that is equivalent to a speed of 11.1ppm, nevertheless increasing the page count to a 20-page document can take the speed up to 15.8ppm which is more than 75% of the rated speed. The 5-page graphics and text document that is printed at 13ppm and a 15 cm x 10 cm size photo on an A4 sheet consumed roughly about 13 seconds at the printer’s maximum resolution termed FastRes 1200. At the standard FastRes 600, it consumed just nearly 10 seconds. These speeds are comparatively good for an entry-level printer compared to the recent Samsung models namely the ML-1915 and ML-2525.

Print quality:

It is not easy to mention anything about the print quality of latest, monochrome laser printers, as almost all manufacturers have got the fundamentals sussed. Text at regular point sizes from 10-12 point shows no piece of art of any consequence and is black and dense. While home users may be able to point out the difference between letterpress print and this laser output, for many business users, there will be small obvious differences and the print quality is more than sufficient for printed materials that are meant for the general public and internal reports. Greyscale print is also somewhat good with normally smooth greyscales that are available for different types of business graphics, however for the most part, graphics and business chart look clean and smart.

Even photo images, something that no mono laser printer would like to work on, looks quite well detailed and realistic, whilst areas of sky look a little spotty, at least they are not covered in dark and light bands as is more often the case with less pricey laser engines. Also the level of detail in the darker areas of photo is far better than average, with not much of the image turning to black. Overall, on large text (60 pt and over), jagged areas were discernable on what should be curved, smooth edges. It is a big concern though and smaller text looks sharp, clear and it is just about readable reduced down to 2pt in Times New Roman.

Cost per page:

The single-piece toner and drum cartridge is available in only one capacity, although HP is able to more than halve by providing an introductory cartridge excellent for simply 700 pages. We suppose it is legitimate to provide a new machine with the lesser of two capacities of printer consumables, if both of them are available to purchase, however to produce an exclusive, low-capacity cartridge just to ship with a new printer strikes us as pessimistic. And the question that arises here is that why should new customers not enjoy the benefit of the standard yield cartridge? At the cheapest price, we were able to find for the consumable, the page cost is found to be 0.7p for paper. This is not especially good. When you compare this with two Samsung machines, you are looking at around 0.8p more per page with the HP Laserjet PRO P1102W Printer. The reason is that the HP cartridge is relatively new to market either or it has been already made use of in other HP machines.

Power consumption:

HP has made a good attempt to keep power consumption level down and in standby mode, the power draw was measured to be just 2W, which is quite low. In this mode, the machine just takes about 7 seconds for churning out the first page. The printer should be started from cold though and wait goes on to increase considerably to over 50 seconds, something that can prove to be a pain if you have to print in a rush.

What is in the box?

• Documentation on CD & Printer software
• Power cord
• Starter Cartridge: 700 pages according to ISO/IEC 19752
• USB install cable (of length 1m)

Manufacturer Warranty:

The HP PRO P1102W Printer carries a limited manufacturer’s warranty of 1 year from the original purchase date.

Bottom-line:

Before we move on to the end of the review, here is a quick glance at the pros and cons of the P1102w.

Positives:

• Low energy consumption both in running and standby mode
• First page is quick to print, even when coming out of standby mode
• Wi-fi connection

Negatives:

• Single function machine for the cost of an all-in-one printer
• Comparatively high price per page for laser which is 2.7pence
• Start-up toner provided which is 700 pages and is almost half the amount you may find in a standard.

Overall, the HP Laserjet PRO P1102W Printer is a worthwhile, low-cost, entry-level mono laser printer with good, fast print quality pages and wireless connection. This said, it is relatively pricey to run though and costs roughly about 25% to purchase than its competition. There is the Espon’s brilliant machine namely the Epson Aculaser M1200 which is available online for under £50, giving the user far cheaper cost of running. But the P1102w does seem to sound a lot more expensive. Unless you are a devoted HP customer, you will obviously find other printers that are solid contenders here.

HP Laserjet PRO P1102W Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Positives:

• Great value for money
• Fast enough for use at home & first copy is super fast
• Small footprint
• Speedy warm up
• Extremely compact design, small & manually installable drivers, big paper tray
• Crisp black text
• Fast & clean monochrome prints of graphics & text
• Comes with a starter toner cartridge

Negatives:

• Short of some advanced features
• Glossy colour seems to leave some fingerprint marks
• Minor ghosting on draft-quality graphics
• Paper capacity is quite low

Besides, we also found this Samsung laser printer to have a low noise level and simple-to-use power button that ensures maximum convenience. But will the printer prove a reliable resource for both personal and office related printing tasks? Let us find out in this review.

How is the design?

The Samsung ML-1665 Monochrome Laser Printer, a black and white mono laser printer seems like it may well have been built at any point in the past10 years. There is no compromise whatsoever to X-generation tricks. Measuring 341mm (W) x 224mm (D)  x 184mm (H) (13.4″ x 8.8″ x 7.2″), the ML-1665 is a small, black box designed and built to be closed when not in use and to consume very little space on the work desk. This comes as a big sigh of relief for those who are very space conscious. Said this, you need a bit of room to open the printer before you begin printing. On the inside there is a small print engine and it happens to give you pretty neat print works in as little time as possible at lower costs. The printer is available now at a price of around £75, although there are places where you may get the printer for slightly less than £70.

What’s in the box?

• Samsung ML-1665 printer
• Toner cartridge (pre-installed – starter 700 sheet capacity)
• Mains Cable
• Instruction manual
• Driver CD

Paper & Handling:

The front cover of the Samsung ML-1665 Black Colour Printer can fold down and turn out to be a 150-sheet paper feed tray and comes with an adjustable paper stop which can nicely hold the feed stack in place. This seems to be a standard set-up built with a small printer; said this side-mounted paper trays will have enabled the printer to have a slightly smaller footprint. You can feed up each page onto the top of the machine, where you find the top cover folding out to become the output tray. Do not be troubled if you forget to open the printer’s top output though, it will not lead to any sort of crumpled print-outs or paper-jams. You can find a gap at the front that enables printed pages to exit unimpeded. Said this, it does not give you any undesirable pile of printed paper on the floor or the desk. On the right of the output tray there is a control panel which is quite simple having two led indicators, between them displaying power, error conditions & incoming data and two control buttons.

Toner cartridge:

Weighing 4.2kg (9.2lbs), the ML-1665 comes with a single-piece drum and toner cartridge. The cartridge slots in under the surround to the machine’s top cover, after it is folded out of the way. Now this is child’s play and anybody should be able to do it in a couple of minute’s time. You will get the cartridge only in one capacity, 1,500 ISO pages which, however low, is not bad a yield at all for a cartridge in a printer that is intended for the home.  The ISO standard specifies approximately 5% tone cover per page, although, therefore if most of your pages are report-length instead of simple correspondence, you might find you get lesser number of pages than this from each toner cartridge.

Control buttons:

Coming to the control panel, it is designed with no more than a couple of buttons and a single indicator, although one of those control buttons has a novel function. You can find a combo of 2 hard control buttons and 2 LED indicator lights. The LED indicator lights are designed to flash maniacally in case you find any hardware problems. One of the control buttons will turn the machine on, whilst the other one is a ‘print screen’ control button that can automatically print whatever is currently displayed on the monitor of the PC or Mac attached to the printer. So it really does what it says with a single press. The print-screen control button is not the most impressive of things, but the screen print function is something that is still unique to Samsung lasers and no other printer manufacturers has integrated this aspect still and it works a pleasure. This is an easy and quick way of recording web transactions and interesting pages. It may sound more intuitive having a keyboard key dedicated to screen print than a physical control button on the printer.

Printing speed:

The print speed is not amazingly quick, but 15.2ppm for mono text is somewhat fast enough for personal use. The Samsung ML-1665 Laser Printer can print at a print resolution of 1200 x 600 dpi and the manufacturer claims it could give out 16 pages per minute in A4 (17ppm in Letter), with the very first page popping out in just 8.5 sec. Most brands seem to make vague, imprecise speed proclamations, though the manufacturer has not in this case. On testing the machine, the Samsung ML-1665 was able to manage a print speed of 15.2ppm for printing a single-page text document at decent draft quality. That perhaps is the quickest possible print job that we can throw at the ML-1665. The printer still managed to print a 10-page document containing mixed graphics and text at good draft quality at a speed of 11.5ppm. It took 30 seconds for the machine to print a 5-page text document and that gives a speed of precisely 10ppm, however on the longer, a 20-page document managed a speed of 14.82ppm. This is just a page per minute slower compared to the Samsung ML-2525 and the ML-1665 surpasses the ML-2525 on printing 5-page text and graphics, which it completes in 33 seconds achieving a speed of 9.09ppm. In spite of all our attempts to slow the system down, the Samsung ML-1665 laser printer managed quick first-page print outputs, courtesy its fast 150MHz processor in addition to memory/storage of 8MB. The decent processing power obviously helps the printer maintain high print speeds for more serious jobs at greater resolutions. A screen print took approximately 12 seconds and to print 15 x 10cm photo on an A4 sheet, it took about 10 seconds, regardless of the print mode.

Print quality:

Talking about the print quality, the print quality of the Samsung ML-1665 is superb, as we have come to expect from their mono lasers. Mono text is sharp, clean and perfect. We found the Greyscale shading pretty good in the illustrations from our test set of business documents, though there is a bit of variation through some areas of greyscale fill, whilst not quite enough to be termed banding, it is simply not visible. And printing at a respectable draft quality was more than enough for graphics and text.  There is no noticeable ghosting observed on graphics that is of draft-quality, though this is fully removed when you are printing at 1200 x 600dpi, which is its maximum resolution. Try printing text at full resolution and the ML-1665 will produce rich and sharp blacks with no real signs of any splatter and high contrast. The only minor flaw in the quality obtained of our prints was there is a bit of graininess and perceptible half-toning in photos. We also noted a couple of little jagged imperfections in the smooth, fine curves in few of our line graphs. In terms of quality, there is not much to pick between the ML-1665 and ML-2525 as both showed decent levels of detail and capable of reproducing some of the shadow detail too. There is a visible dot mask to the image, but for regular work, the 600 x 1,200dpi images look absolutely fine.

Easy set-up:

Setting up the system was a breeze. Thanks to the CD-ROM which comes alongside the printer with a Windows 7 driver. This means you will not have to search for the latest versions online to get up and running. We had no trouble with changing settings as well. Samsung ML-1665 is compatible with both Windows 7 as well as Mac OSX and had no problems with drivers or sort of anything like that. We had it running in just 10 minutes under Windows 7. So, how do you go about the set-up? Just pop in the desk and stick to the on-screen prompts (Windows 7). So a big thumbs-up there.  However installing the printer driver on the XP Vista can be a tricky job.

Data connection:

The only data connection that you find is USB and installation is a doddle. But one little note on the printer’s set up front. Ensure you have a USB cable lying around so that it can be connected to your PC or Mac. It is a bit unfortunate that the ML-1665 does not have a USB cable and not to mention that it is not at all expensive. Said this, we do not find the same in most leading makes.  It took us very little time to get it up and running smoothly and we suppose the same must be true for you. Therefore, as long as you have a USB cable on hand, you should have no problem at all.

Running cost:

Considering just one consumable, it is easy to calculate the running costs. The 1,500-page cartridge could cost well over £45. We did a lot of search online only to find out that even the cheapest source gives only a cost of 3.9p per page and that includes 0.7p for the paper. This costs just a penny more page than the ML-2525, which is the main difference between the two machines. Just compare the ML-1665 with other entry-level mono laser printers; nevertheless, the operating cost is by no means unique. Being a relatively new printer, it might well be that both its price and running cost of its main consumable will come down in the coming months and this means you have a more economical machine to run.

Manufacturer warranty:

The Samsung ML-1665 Laser Printer comes with an on-site warranty service of 12 months from the original date of purchase.

Conclusion:

If you are a light user, then you will be pretty happy with the ML-1665 as it comes with a very low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) owing to its cheap purchase price. At simply over £70, there are some cheaper printers that can produce a TCO of £152 over 3 years of light use (i.e., 100 pages per month). Unfortunately, the ML-1665 is not your cup of tea if your printing need is higher. A medium print load of about 750 pages/month over a period of 3 years could provide you a staggering £842 TCO. A lot quieter than regular inkjet printers, we actually liked the one touch screen dump as it obviously saves you time going to menus. It is excellent for low-usage where you do not require the ink to dry out way before it is time. Therefore, if all you want is a simple printer that would come in handy for screen prints and correspondence, the Samsung ML-1665 fits the bill brilliantly. Perhaps with the experience of having reviewed several mono laser printers in the past, this one seems to show a decent turn of speed, with not very little time taken for processing before your start the printer. But nonetheless, you require clearing the paper away between print sessions.

Samsung ML-1665 Mono Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Pros:

• OCR scanning (word recolonization, converts scanned words into text documents)
• Quick & high quality scanning
• Lots of software options
• Easy driver installation
• Custom Copy buttons & scan buttons
• Fast printing
• Fairly cheep toner & lasting

Cons:

• No LCD display
• Not as good looking

You will be pretty amazed at some of the capabilities of this all-in-one printer as we did a search on other machines and nothing came close to it.  So, let us take a look at the possibilities in the following review on the Brother DCP-7030 laser printer.

Design features:

Brother had no second thoughts in integrating its latest mono laser print engine into a number of different models and multifunction machines in a wide range of product suite. The DCP-7030 laser printer is at the lower rung of its triple-function range, which gives you mono copying and colour scanning as well as mono laser print. Though the flatbed scanner on top of the print engine is slightly wider than the printer itself, the manufacturer has made a decent expansion in its line, so the unit has a neat, integrated look. It would sit pretty squat on your desktop, as well, so is unobtrusive in a small business or home office environment. Though the model lacks an automatic document feeder, there is a separate glass trip at the end of the flatbed, usually used when you feed paper for scanning. This makes the scanner section pretty wider than it otherwise need to be.

Weighing 9.9kg, the DCP-7030 Laser Printer machine has a pale grey and cream finish and appears to be a bit less severe than several of the black and silver units on offer. Not to mention that the model’s control panel is appreciably simple. Although the copy function panel has some great options like enlargement and reduction function, colour/ contrast adjustment settings and up to four pages per sheet, you can find a single row of buttons which is quite simple to understand. And there is the large Start and Cancel buttons positioned at the right end of the row that are hard to miss.

Print engine of Brother:

The printer drum and cartridges, though in separate cartridges, can slide into place as the tone can be easily replaced about six times, before you require swapping out the printer drum cartridge as well. The print engine of Brother was tested twice before in HL-2140, a standalone printer and a business multifunction, having all the additional features for wireless connection and fax, the MFC-7840W. The machine though simple in design delivers the same level of performance with these other models.

LCD display:

The 2-line by 16-character LCD display is nicely used, but it desperately needs a backlight. We found that the reflections can make it relatively difficult to read even when you are standing right over the machine. And in case you have the printer on the desk at the side of you, you will still find it difficult to make out the characters.

Built with only USB connection:

We were pretty satisfied with the fact that the entire scanner section hinges up to deal with paper jams and we had no problems during testing whatsoever. Also, you need not have to lift to get at the drum and toner cartridges, although, as these slide from the front, once you fold down the front cover. The DCP-7030 Multifunction Laser Printer is built with only a USB connection and this means you will have to configure your PC to share it or purchase a router having printer support, if you need to use it over a network. An issue here is that it is not clearly stated before purchase and you need to purchase it separately. There are only two sockets at the back of the machine; one is for the main power and the other for the USB2.

Easy set-up:

Setting up is a breeze and we ran Windows XP and had it running very quickly.  The printer showed up immediately in the system preference. Mac and Linux users have nothing to fear for a change.

Software & Drivers:

Coming to the installation part, the software bundle can be installed in one simple, easy operation from the CD you are supplied with. The software suite comprises OmniPage optical character recognition and Nuance’s PaperPort document management applications, but if you want to go for a different package or you do not need a document management, the installation disc comes with a version of the suite without Paperport. Brother also gives you a quick and simple Control Centre application as well.

Low Running costs:

There are only two costs to operating the DCP-7030; one is the toner (which comes at a reasonable price) and the other, the drum unit. The high-capacity toner cartridge should give you 2,600 ISO pages and the 12,000 page drum costs around 2.83p per page, which sits in the mid-range for mono laser print. The only time you need to replace the toner is when it runs out; keeping your running cost under control. At the same time though, it cannot be more expensive than the inkjet printer.

Printing Speed:

The manufacturer claims print speeds of up to 22ppm for the DCP-7030 printer, but did we mention that the test machine took 22 sec on each of 5-page test documents namely text with business graphics and straight text. This is equivalent to 13.6ppm, some way off the quoted number. We usually assume Brother’s quoted speeds are calculated from print tests in draft mode, but Brother does not comprise a draft mode as such in the print driver. We experimented bringing the resolution down to 300dpi, turning on the toner mode and opting for Office Document (i.e., no graphics) as the printer type, although this made no significant difference to the speed we had seen. Printing a single page, A4 copy takes just 12 seconds, which provides the machine a copy speed of 55ppm, a tad faster on larger copy jobs. Now, that is great going for a digital, laser printer based machine, especially for one that costs well under £120. The time consumption for a 15 x 10cm photo is roughly 14 seconds which is fairly good for a machine in this price range.

Print quality:

The most impressive feature is perhaps the print quality, as from other printer devices, using this engine is pretty amazing with clean black text displaying no signs of spatter or other print anomalies visible at close distances. You may even find that small point sizes appear clean, neat and uniformly printed with the machine’s native resolution of 600x600dpi. Said that the machine is capable of delivering a much higher resolution of 1200x600dpi with software enhancement. This proved particularly useful on test photos which had smoother shading, sharper lines and lesser visible dithering in HQ 1200 mode. Moving onto greyscale graphics still shows the printer device to be really capable of smooth, clean output with clear definition in each character produced and good registration of black over grey colour. Our test photo print underpins the opinion as there is little sign of banding in areas of grey. We found some loss of detail in shadow areas, but that is appreciably low, but overall you will find the photos good enough for regular use in office documents. There was a slight drop-off in the print quality when copying docs with some areas of greyscale fill. But then the greys start to appear quite patchy and nowhere as regular as the originals from which they were taken.

Paper & Handling:

Another plus point is the slide-in paper which will keep the paper and the innards of the device well protected from dust. The DCP-7030 All-in-one Laser Printer features a capacity paper tray of 250-sheets adjustable for legal or letter size paper in addition to single-sheet manual bypass for labels, envelopes or other media types. There is a fold-out rear output tray that provides a straight-through paper path and is perfect when you are using the single-sheet bypass slot to print envelopes or thicker media.

Professional copying:

We liked the Flatbed mono copying feature available on this machine and the good news is that it can produce the same, high standard output of a standalone copier.  The printer has an automatic document feeder that will let you copy multiple pages automatically so that you can go about doing your routine work. It is not work shy because its stack and sort feature would automatically collate the pages. In addition to these time-saving attributes, you can also save the cost of paper by minimising 2, 4, 9, 16 or 25 page docs very easily on the copier onto one single sheet. The following are some of its features worth mentioning.

• Up to 99 multi-copies
• Enlarge and reduce copies from 25% – 400% in 1% increments
• Stack and sort functions

Hi-resolution colour scanning:

The DCP-7030 Mono Laser Printer can help scan documents directly to a preferred file on your PC in a format of your choice with a single button press. Not surprisingly, it can scan documents and send them right to your e-mail as an attachment or to a single PDF file. The direct editing feature is pretty useful as it could scan an image right away to an image editing application and here you are, it is ready for printing or editing – great for the lazy!. With the Scan to OCR feature, you can have your pre-printed documents edited in a jiffy. Check out some of its scanning features that make it one of the most competitive options on the market.

• Enhanced High resolution colour scanning up to 9600 dpi
• 48 bit input / 24 bit output colour depth
• 256 shades of grey

Though the scan quality is restricted by the 600 x 2400 dpi maximum optical resolution, the scans are accurately coloured and noticeably sharp.

Warranty information:

The DCP-7030 is covered under a manufacturer warranty of 12 months from the original purchase date. The manufacturer also provides 1 year limited warranty for service & support.

Bottom-line:

There is something that we like the least about the machine and that is when inputting the enlargement/reduction manually; we found no keyboard to enter the percentage. For example, if you need 137%, you cannot just enter ‘137’, but press down the ‘+’ button 37 times, which is really annoying. The DCP-7030 does not boast hell lot of features, but it is a very serviceable all-in-one printer that is built around a good print engine that should deliver optimum print performance and service without burning a hole in your pocket. More importantly, it does what it is supposed to.  With out-of-the-ordinary quality and commendably simple maintenance, it is a great piece of personal printer for a light to medium workload at just over £100. Said that, heavy handed users might find it a bit on the flimsy side. All said and done, we reckon it is a good buy and the DCP-7030 matches up to several, pricier machines. If customer reviews are any sort of indication, the service offered by the seller is top class.

Brother DCP-7030 Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Features:

HP LaserJet CM1312 Multifunction Colour Laser Printer is an awesome product from HP which decked out in cream and has stylish polished looks with elegant curving. A simple, A4 flatbed scanner is present under the cream lid. The control panel is backed up by a two-line by 16-character LCD display. This has no backlight and thus it angles forward and contrast is high enough to be read in normal overhead light. Controls are fairly good for a laser-based multifunction printer, but the large, raised button which cycles right and left through menu options when we press either end of it, has an OK button set within it, which makes it fiddly to use.

Unfortunately, the scanner section of this device does not hinge up, but there is sufficient space between it and the printer section to rescue any paper that might get jammed. The HP LaserJet CM1312 printer section has a very rounded front, which is a hinged cover giving direct access to the cartridges and below this we have a 150-sheet paper tray. Just above the tray is a hinged cover, which is labelled as ‘Front door for jam access’. During paper jams we would have to lift this cover and remove the paper tray below to be able to get a hand in.

When you fold down the printer’s front cover there’s an inset handle, which pulls out a tray holding four and near-identical drum and toner cartridges. This makes it a particularly easy colour laser to maintain which is remarkable in a device at this price. The software CD comprises of custom-made HP software for scanning, copying and printing and a copy of ReadIris OCR software. To make the entire installation process very easy, animated instructions is present for setup.

LaserJet CM1312 scanner’s maximum resolution is 1,200 dpi. Scan speeds and quality are really good, with sharp detail and accurate colours. Tiny 5pt fonts were crisp and legible even at 150dpi. Unfortunately, the interface makes it difficult to make multiple scans as there are no auto-cropping features and the interface software closes between scans. The scanner driver of CM1312 has been improved with additional colour and image adjustment options. Even though, the scanner driver has been improved, many annoying aspects of the old driver interface remain, and some vital settings have been buried in obscure locations.

Performance:

The Colour LaserJet CM1312  Printer would find it very difficult to win any printing races. HP claims that this machine can print 12ppm in black and 8ppm in colour, which would be reasonable but, as usual, we couldn’t reach those speeds. Our five-page, black text test document took 48 seconds to complete, resulting in a real-world, black print speed of 6.25ppm. A five-page, colour text and graphics document would take 63 seconds, or an equivalent of 4.76ppm, so both results are little over half the rated figures by HP. A 15 x 10cm photo would take 32 seconds to print and a single page copy would take 38 seconds, which is reasonable given that this model has no Auto Document Feeder (ADF).

The photo print, like all the prints, uses HP’s patented ColourSphere toner. As the name suggests, it is more spherical than most. Even so, the photo prints are rather over-coloured and a little garish. While detail levels are good, and there’s hardly any banding.

The colour and brightness of the photo prints are ideal for business graphics and the colours in the text and graphics page look pretty bright and confident. This is the kind of output which we would love to see and the colour photocopies are very close in colour to the original from which they were copied. The copied documents are free from tonal fading which we notice very often in many copiers. The black text is very smooth, crisp and clean, giving a professional touch even though when it is printed at the machine’s default 600dpi resolution.

The only running costs on HP LaserJet CM1312 all-in-one Printer are the combined drum and toner cartridges, which are rated at 2,200 pages for black and 1,400 pages for each of the colours.

Warranty:

HP LaserJet CM1312 Multifunction Colour Laser Printer comes with the return to dealer warranty of one solid year.

Verdict:

The easy setup and simple design of the colour LaserJet CM1312 make it very endearing, but there are a couple of odd design choices that may let it down. A paper tray holding only 150 sheets on a machine designed for office use is an odd restriction available in LaserJet CM1312. This elegant device would be a fine choice if we are ready to accept certain restrictions like slow speed and pay a bit more for colour page they print or copy.

HP LaserJet CM1312 Printer – Technical Specification Table

Features:

The Brother DCP-7045 is a compact 3 in 1 network laser printer which is perfect for professionals and small work groups as it offers high quality printing, scanning and copying. Brother DCP-7045N Laser Printer employs laser print technology which provides high quality printing with maximum printing resolution of 2400 x 600 dpi. This elegant device weighs 11.1 Kg and the dimensions are 42.8 x 39.6 x 30.4 cm. The maximum supported letter size by this product is 216 x 279 mm. Brother DCP-7045N. The Brother DCP-7045N supports PCL6 and offers a solid memory of 32 MB. This printer has a document feeder which can store up to 35 sheets. Transparencies, envelopes, plain paper and labels are the media formats supported in the laser printer. The output tray of this laser printer can hold 100 sheets and the maximum media capacity supported is 250 sheets.

This DCP-7045N Multifunction Laser Printer provides connectivity through Hi-Speed USB and Ethernet 10 Base-T/100 Base-TX. This device has a highly fast and reliable USB port which makes it PC connectable. TCP/IP and IPP are network protocols that are supported by this product. This new product of Brother is compatible with various operating systems including Linux, MS Windows Server 2003, Apple Mac OS X 10.2.4 or later, MS Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, MS Windows Vista, MS Windows 2000 Professional, MS Windows XP Home Edition and MS Windows XP Professional. Softwares included with Brother DCP-7045N are Presto PageManager and ScanSoft PaperPort SE 11.0. The cartridge provided with this printer can print up to 1500 pages.

Brother DCP-7045N A4 Laser Printer is available in relatively modest price tag which doesn’t prevent Brother from providing some very decent management software so that network administrators can keep an eye on what the printer’s up to. The DCP-7045N produces all our documents quickly and efficiently. Its Scan-to-e-mail key and OCR function make life even easier.

Performance:

Brother DCP-7045N can print up to a maximum number of 22 pages per minute. Printing speed and maximum copying speed is almost the same. The maximum printing resolution of this laser printer is 2400 x 600 dpi. This laser printer takes less that 10 seconds for the first print out. The scanning facility of the Brother DCP-7045N provides an optical resolution up to 600 x 2400 dpi. The text quality is actually cleaner and sharper than that of some of its competitors. This printer is not up to the mark on graphics, and while it’s fine for presentations, photos lack detail.
Plenty of facilities are available besides the printing capabilities. Even though fax facilities aren’t included, we do get a copier and a scanner built into the Brother DCP-7045N. The scanner is particularly notable, and the scan reproductions are reasonably faithful.

Warranty:

Standard warranty of one year is available for BROTHER DCP-7045N Multifunction Laser Printer.

Verdict:

The Brother DCP-7045N is a compact network ready multifunction mono laser printer, copier and colour scanner. It is an effective multifunction device whose performance is not very appealing when compared to other laser printers of this category. It offers networking and additional multifunction capabilities and it is a perfectly serviceable printer. It can perform a very solid job with a minimum of fuss. It has nothing very excessive or exceptional.

Brother DCP-7045N Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Features:

Brother HL-2140 Personal Laser Printer is a neat and low-profile laser printer, available in light grey and dark slate colour. HL-2140 is heavily curved on its vertical edges, except for the front-left, which shows a stylish, concave curve with a blue power button at the top. One-per-desk style of mono laser printers are cheaper to run than inkjet machines and for those who don’t need colour, they represent a better deal.

Three indicators are present for toner, drum and error conditions which are positioned just behind the power button. A flip-up paper support is available which can be left folded down when printing A4 pages. A main paper tray slides out from the bottom front of the machine to support 250 pages. There exists a special media feed too, but that doesn’t support the pages, so we need to feed them manually. To provide a straight through paper path, in collaboration with this single-sheet feed, a pull down panel is present at the rear end.

Brother HL-2140 Monochrome Laser Printer uses new drum and toner units, which are yet to be quoted through the usual discount sources. For standard capacity the toner units are rated at 1,500 pages and 2,600 pages for high-capacity, with a drum which should last 12,000 pages. In a typical home or small office environment, these capacities are reasonable and maintenance costs will be relatively low when compared with the similar range of printers. It is unusual not to have a single consumable in a printer at this entry-level price even though Brother makes separate toner and drum units. The two consumables are supplied as a single unit and once a cover has been folded down it slides in from the front of the printer. Brother includes a non-standard 1,000-page starter cartridge, just to get you buying early as a new owner although the standard-capacity toner cartridge is rated at 1,500 pages.

When other printers in this range support additional Ethernet and wireless links, this version of the printer comes with a USB 2.0 connector only. It is quite simple to install the software as the Brother software loads its driver and detects the USB connection without intervention. A status monitor is available for the printer but otherwise we are left to the features of the driver, which include multiple pages per sheet, watermarks and poster printing. No duplexer is fit on the HL-2140, but there is software help with producing double-sided prints manually.
Performance:

Brother claims that HL-2140 Compact Mono Laser Printer can print a maximum of 22 pages per minute, which means that a five page document would take around 15 seconds to complete. Toner save mode will make very little difference to the print speed and text print quality, would be quite acceptable for most print jobs, better than many draft modes on other mono lasers.

Quality is more than reasonable in normal print mode with crisp, well-defined black text, right down to small font sizes. Grey scales reproduced from colour originals were printed clearly with very little banding, producing clear, sharp business graphics and well-executed page rules. Photographs could also be printed well with little noticeable banding and some detail in shadows. Even when the printer’s top quality mode of 2,400dpi by 600dpi is used, the dot pattern is surprisingly noticed. The straight 600dpi print mode comes out nearly as well, but there’s little print speed advantage to using the lower resolution.

Warranty:

Brother HL-2140 Compact Mono Laser Printer comes with a standard warranty of one year.

Verdict:

The HL-2140 A4 Mono Laser Printer from Brother is a perfect economical solution to our mono laser printing needs, offering high speed, great quality printouts from a sleek, compact machine. This is a nicely designed, brilliant, personal, mono laser printer that achieves a lot of things you would expect a one-per-desk machine to do. If we are choosy, we would like a multi-purpose tray that could take in more than one sheet at a time, in addition to a toner cartridge with at least the same capacity as the standard-yield consumable is available as a spare. The focus of the HL-2140 A4 Mono Laser Printer is lucid, and this laser has the goods. But for the normal family, this is a great complement to quality inkjet printers and thus the perfect way to equip our home with strong text that syncs well with excellent colour graphics.

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Brother HL-2140 Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table

Features:

Samsung CLP-315W Wireless Colour Laser Printer is a compact printer as has a sleek design and small foot print. It can easily fit into the corner of the room. This wireless printer comes in dark piano black colour and striking polished exterior with 15.3 inches wide by 12.3 inches deep by 9.6 inches tall structure. Samsung CLP-315W has a simple top with several LED lights to indicate the toner level, to notify the paper jams, to denote the wireless connectivity. At the bottom of this laser printer resides a removable paper tray which can hold a standard 150 sheets of paper which can be of any size varying from 8.5 inches by 14 inches. The absence of cancel button in the control panel of CLP-315W might irk the users as they cannot cancel the task in the middle. Cancellation of job is possible only manually through operating system. As the manual feed slot is absent in this laser printer, main input tray has to be utilised for different kinds of irregular media like cards, and envelopes.

Four toner cartridges reside behind the drop-down panel on the front faceplate. This includes one black and four colour cartridges. These cartridges being light weight are very easy to remove and replace. One of the major demerits of CLP-315W Wireless printer is that it can print only up to 1000 pages per month. Hence, users who have a huge target should opt for a better printer. It has an in-built memory of 32MB. The Samsung CLP-315W has a USB Port at the rear end. Establishing a wireless connection with this printer might be bit complicated process initially. Hence, installing the driver with the printer attached to the PC with USB first and setting up the wireless connection would be a good approach. A web server namely, SyncThru Web Service is embedded into the driver that lets the user to do the network settings without any additional software. The printer’s ip address and other information has to be furnished in this web server. To establish a wireless connection, it would take around half an hour as the whole procedure is quiet tedious.

Performance:

Samsung CLP-315W Network Laser Printer can print up to 13.15 pages per minute for plain black speed. This printer can print only around 3.64 pages per minute for the colour documents including the graphics. The CLP-315W offers resolution up to 2400 x 600 dpi output and duty cycle of 20,000 pages. And the worst case is that this printer fails to compensate the print speed with the print quality. Moreover, it offers inconsistent results for black and white and colour prints. When compared with the other colour laser printers of the similar price, the overall performance of Samsung CLP-315W Colour/Mono Laser Printer is relatively poor especially for colour prints.

Warranty:

Samsung CLP-315W Laserjet Printer offers an industry standard one-year warranty. Samsung gives the provision to avail telephone support everyday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Useful information such as manual and driver downloads, a media guide, and a comprehensive list of FAQs are present in the Samsung website to help users further.

Verdict:

Samsung CLP-315W is a wireless ready laser printer with light weight, sleek design and small footprint. Unfortunately, this fancy looking economical wireless printer has higher cost per page than average, slow output, low duty cycle, no manual feed tray, no dedicated cancel button and dissatisfying output quality. CLP-315W cannot be used to scan or fax or photocopy but it would be good option for home office users as it is economical.

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Samsung CLP-315W Laser Printer – Technical Specification Table