Samsung has brought out a mono laser printer with a lot of convenient features, the Samsung ML-1665 and here you have a laser printer with an elegant, compact design such that there is space for this little piece of beauty anywhere.  There is much more than design to this printer and here is a summary of the pros and cons of the ML-1665 before we get into the details.

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.

Samsung ML-1665 Mono Laser Printer

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.

Samsung ML-1665 Laser Printer with Paper Tray

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

Manufacturer Samsung
Model Name Samsung ML-1665 Mono Laser Printer
Product Code ML-1665/ MLT-D1042S
Printer type/Technology Personal printer – laser – monochrome
Dimensions 341mm (W) x 224mm (D)  x 184mm (H) (13.4″ x 8.8″ x 7.2″)
Weight 4.2kg (9.2lbs)
Standard Memory 8MB
Max Printing Resolution/Native
print resolution		 1,200x600dpi / 600x600dpi
Printer Drivers /Emulations Any web print, driver
Max Printing Speed Up to 17 ppm – B/W – ANSI A (Letter) (216 x 279 mm);
Up to 16 ppm – B/W – A4 (210 x 297 mm)
First Print/Copy Out Time B/W < 8.5 seconds (from Ready Mode)
Maximum paper input/ Output tray capacity 150/ 100 sheets
Supported Media Type Plain, Cotton, Thin, Archive, Recycled, Pre-Printed,
Coloured, Bond, Label, Envelopes, Thick,
Transparency, Cardstock
PC Connection USB 2.0
OS Support Windows 2000/Vista/XP/7/ 2003 Server,
several Linux OS, Mac OS X 10.3 ~ 10.6, 2008 Server
Power Consumption 350W
Processor 150MHz
Noise Level < 49dBA (Printing), < 25dBA (Standby)
Language Simulation SPL (Samsung Printer Language)
Package contents Samsung ML-1665 printer
Toner cartridge (pre-installed – starter 700 sheet capacity)
Mains Cable
Instruction manual
Driver CD
Additional features Print screen/Web area button
Monthly Duty Cycle Up to 5000 pages
Warranty type On-site
Manufacturer warranty 1 year

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