Samsung Xpress M2835DW

BY M. DAVID STONE

Small enough to serve as a personal monochrome laser printer, the Samsung Xpress M2835DW ($159.99) is also capable enough to be a good fit as a shared printer in a micro office. It doesn’t offer quite enough to topple the Editors’ ChoiceXpress M2825DW$122.00 at Amazon it’s replacing in Samsung’s line. It costs a little more and the competition today is a bit tougher, but it’s still a strong contender.

The M2835DW$159.00 at Amazon lets you connect via USB, Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Wi-Fi Direct. If you connect it to a network, you can print though the cloud, and from Android and iOS smartphones and tablets through an access point. Thanks to Wi-Fi Direct, even if you connect it to a PC by USB cable to use it as a personal printer, you can print directly from your mobile device.

In addition, you get NFC support, which means that if you have a compatible mobile device, you can connect simply by touching that phone or tablet to a clearly marked spot on the printer, and then print using Samsung’s app. During testing, I ran into a minor problem with the NFC connection at first with a Samsung Galaxy S III, but after turning everything off and back on again, the connection worked as promised.

Paper Handling and Setup
At only 8 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD) and 16.4 pounds, the M2835DW is small enough to comfortably share a desk with and light enough for one person to move easily, which helps make it a good choice as a personal printer. Even so, it offers ample paper handling for a shared printer, with a 250-sheet input tray, a duplexer (for two-sided printing), and a one-sheet manual feed. This should be more than enough for most personal or micro-office use.

For my tests, I connected the printer using its Ethernet port and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista. Setting the printer up on a network was absolutely typical for a mono laser.

Speed and Output Quality
The engine rating for the M2835DW is 29 pages per minute (ppm), the same as for the Samsung M2825DW. Not surprisingly, the two printers came in at essentially the same speed on our tests. I timed it on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’shardware and software for timing), at 9.7ppm, compared with 9.9ppm for the Samsung M2825DW. (A 0.2ppm difference at this speed isn’t significant.)

The 9.7ppm translates to solid, but not particularly fast, performance for the price. TheBrother HL-2270DW$79.99 at Amazon, for example, came in at 11.7ppm. Even more impressive is the Canon imageClass LBP6200d$126.75 at Canon, which came in at 11.1ppm for its official speed in its default duplex setting, and a much faster 14.5ppm when set to simplex (one-sided) printing. However, the Canon LBP6200d connects by USB only, which is fine for using it as personal printer, but makes it a poor choice for a shared printer.

Output quality for the M2835DW is typical for a monochrome laser across the board. The text score in my tests fell in the middle of a fairly tight range that includes the vast majority of monochrome laser printers. Output is suitable for virtually any business use, but not quite good enough for serious desktop publishing applications.

Graphics, similarly, are easily good enough for any internal business need. Most people would also consider them good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. Photos quality is roughly newspaper-level.

The Samsung M2825DW earned our Editors’ Choice not because of any particularly notable feature, but because of its balance of features. Both the Canon LBP6200d and the Brother HL-2270DW will give you more impressive speed, for example, but they also score slightly lower for quality.

The good news about the Samsung Xpress M2835DW is that it essentially matches the Samsung M2825DW on speed, output quality, and paper handling. Unfortunately, given the slight boost in price compared with the older model (which is still widely available online), and that some of the competition—most notably the Canon LBP6200d—delivers significantly faster speed, the M2835DW doesn’t offer quite enough to earn the Editors’ Choice distinction. That said, it’s still an attractive choice, and it can certainly be a good fit as either a personal printer or as a shared printer in a micro office.

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Samsung Xpress M2020W

BY M. DAVID STONE

Clearly designed for personal, rather than office use, the Samsung Xpress M2020W ($129.99) monochrome laser printer offers reasonably good speed along with output quality that’s good enough for most business needs. It also offers Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, and NFC support, which gives it an edge over much of its competition. Unfortunately, its running cost is high enough to be a potential issue if you need it for anything more than extremely light-duty use.

Like the Brother HL-2240$81.93 at Amazon and Samsung’s own Xpress M2625D$71.09 at Amazon, which is our Editors’ Choice for a low-cost personal monochrome laser, the M2020W$68.79 at Amazon is smaller than most inkjets, at 7.0 by 13.0 by 8.5 inches. The combination of the small size and a low paper capacity, at 150 sheets, is what defines the M2020 as a personal printer.

One advantage the M2020W has over both the Brother HL-2240 and Samsung M2625D is its Wi-Fi support, although not in the way you might think. Although Wi-Fi will let you share the printer easily on a network in a micro office, the low paper capacity could leave you refilling the tray a lot.

The more attractive use of Wi-Fi is for mobile printing. Connect the printer to a network, and you can print from a phone or tablet though a Wi-Fi access point. Even better, the Wi-Fi support includes Wi-Fi Direct, which means you can connect directly from a mobile device to print, even if the printer isn’t on a network. And if your phone or tablet supports NFC, you can also connect simply by touching it to a clearly marked spot on the printer. In my tests, I connected this way with a Samsung Galaxy S III and printed without problems.

Setup, Speed, and Output Quality
Setup is standard for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected by USB cable and printed from a Windows Vista system.

Samsung rates the M2020W at 21 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing text files or other output with little to no formatting. On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing) it came in at 9.2ppm, which is appropriately fast for the rating. However, it’s a touch slower than the Samsung M2625D, at 9.9ppm, and significantly slower than the Brother HL-2240, at 11.4ppm.

The output quality is best described as good enough for most purposes, but not impressive. Text quality was at the low end of the range where the vast majority of monochrome lasers fall, which means it’s not quite good enough for high-quality desktop publishing, but more than good enough for almost any business use.

Graphics output was absolutely par for a monochrome laser. That makes it easily good enough for any internal business use. Most people would also consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like. Photos were at the low end of a very tight range where virtually all monochrome lasers fall, making them good enough for applications like printing recognizable photos from webpages, but not much more than that.

The one potentially serious drawback for the M2020W is its running cost, at 5.3 cents per page. In comparison, the Samsung M2625D claims 3.9 cents per page, and the Brother HL-2240 claims 3.8 cents. Compared with either of those two models, that works out to a difference of at least $1.40 for every 100 pages, $14 for every 1,000 pages, and $140 for every 10,000 pages. If you don’t expect to print many pages over the printer’s lifetime, the running cost may not be an issue. However, the more you print, the higher the difference in total cost of ownership will be.

If you have no need for the wirerless printing options in the Samsung Xpress M2020W, you will almost certainly be better off with either the Brother HL-2240 or the Editors’ Choice Samsung M2625D. Both deliver higher paper capacities and lower running costs, with the Brother HL-2240 delivering significantly faster speed and the Samsung M2625D adding a duplexer.

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Samsung Xpress C410W

by Jon L. Jacobi

Most low-priced color lasers are big disappointments: slow, with mediocre color images and costly toner prices. The Samsung Printer XPress C410W rises above some of the stereotypes, offering impressively good print quality and decently priced black toner. However, its color toners are costly, and print performance is agonizingly slow. Its ability to print via near-field communication (NFC) is interesting, though still somewhat niche. Call it an adequate low-volume printer for the home or small office, with a couple of bonus features.

Typical low-end color laser in most respects

Physically, there’s not a lot to talk about with the XPress C410W. It’s your standard, boxy laser printer that’s been with us since the first HP Laserjet. There’s a 150-sheet paper cassette at the bottom of the unit and a 50-sheet output tray integrated into the top. The front panel folds down to reveal the four svelte toner cartridges and other replaceable parts. There’s no automatic duplexer. Dialog boxes coach you through manual two-sided printing. The controls on top of the XPress C410W are simple and easy to use. The printer may be connected via Wi-Fi, Ethernet, or USB so you can place it wherever you see fit.

It took me a while to get the NFC printing to work—basically because I didn’t read the manual, which instructs you to match the tag on the back of your mobile device with the tag on the top of the printer. The lab guys got quite the kick out of my tapping manically everywhere except where I should have been.

Obviously, you must have a mobile device capable of NFC (Samsung provided a Galaxy SIII). Match tags, select what you want to print, match the tags again, and you’re golden. How often you’ll be standing next to a printer to match tags is questionable. Most of the time, printing via Wi-Fi will be more useful.

Color toner is costly

Whether the XPress C410W’s pricey toner costs will ever catch up with you depends on how much you print. The cartridges don’t last long—just 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 pages for each color. Samsung was selling them for $63.99 (black) and $54.99 (each color) at this writing, which comes out to a good 3.2 cents per page for black and a pricey 5.5 cents per color, per page. A four-color page would cost 19.7 cents. We saw lower prices for the same cartridges at other sources, so shopping around might save you a bit. This printer is designed for people who don’t print much, so it could take you a while to get through even these modest-sized cartridges. Still, you’re going to feel it when you re-supply—and that will be soon, as the Xpress C410W ships with 700-page black, and 500-page color starter cartridges.

Additional costs include a $98 imaging unit, which is good for 16,000 black pages and 4,000 color pages, as well as a $13 toner waste container that’s good for 7,500 black pages and 1750 color pages. Eventually those replacements will add another 0.8 cents per page. Not the stuff of a bargain hunter’s dreams.

Very slow performance

The XPress C410W’s speed is strictly ho-hum for a laser printer, but acceptable for the printer’s intended small- or home-office role.Text and monochrome graphics pages printed at an aggregate 8.2 per minute on the PC and 7.9 on the Mac. Small (4-by-6-inch) photos printed at about 2 pages per minute in graphics mode and 1.5 pages in photo mode. A full-page photo printed on the Mac took about 54 seconds.

What makes this all arguably worthwhile is the print quality, which is surprisingly good for a low-end model. Although we sometimes had to fiddle with settings to get the best possible quality, even the default colors printed smoothly and looked fairly realistic, whether they were fleshtones, landscapes, or objects. An inkjet in this price range, such as the HP OfficeJet Pro 8100 ePrinter, will deliver even better color quality—and likely, better ink prices and speed—but if you must stick with color laser, you could do worse than the XPress C410W.

Though the Samsung Printer XPress C410W’s NFC printing is a neat trick, it’s compelling only in a world where NFC is everywhere. It’s not. Of its other qualities, the look of the XPress C410W’s output is its best suit and may compensate for the unit’s mundane speed. We’d like this printer a lot better with more reasonable supply costs, though—at least a half-star better.

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Samsung Xpress M2825DW

BY M. DAVID STONE

One step up in Samsung’s line from the Editors’ Choice Samsung Xpress M2625D$69.99 at Amazon that I recently reviewed, the Samsung Xpress M2825DW ($150 street) delivers essentially the same output quality, paper handling, and speed on our tests. What it primarily adds for the step up in price is Ethernet and Wi-Fi, including Wi-Fi Direct, along with support for mobile printing. As with its lesser sibling, it delivers enough to make it Editors’ Choice, but in this case as a shared printer in a micro office or as a personal printer if you need the network connection or mobile printing.

The mobile printing support lets you print through the cloud and print from Android, iOS, and Windows smartphones and tablets. For printing through the cloud, the printer has to be connected to your network, using either an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. For printing from a mobile device, however, you have two choices.

If the printer’s on a network, you can connect through a Wi-Fi access point. Thanks to the printer’s Wi-Fi Direct, however, you can also connect directly from your mobile device to the printer, a trick you can take advantage of even for a personal printer connected to your computer by USB cable.

Basics and Setup
Other than the network and mobile printing support, there’s little difference between the Samsung M2625D and M2825DW. Both printers are the same size at 8.0 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD), making them small enough to share a desk with easily, and both weigh just 16.4 pounds. They also both offer the same paper handling, with a 250-sheet input tray, a one-sheet manual feed slot, and a duplexer (for automatic two-sided printing). This should be suitable for most personal or micro office use, but if you need more, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Samsung doesn’t offer any paper handling upgrades.

Setting up the M2825DW on a network is absolutely typical for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected it using the Ethernet port and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista.

Speed and Output Quality
Samsung rates the M2825DW at 29 pages per minute (ppm) compared with 27 ppm for the Samsung M2625D. The differences showed in my tests when printing a text file with little formatting, with the M2825DW coming in at 30.3 ppm, or not quite 2 ppm faster than the M2825DW. However, the two scored essentially identical speeds on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing), at 9.9 ppm.

As with the Ssamsung M2625D, this counts as a good speed for the price, but not a particularly impressive one. The Editors’ Choice Brother HL-2270DW$149.99 at Sears, for example, came in at 11.7 ppm.

The M2825DW was virtually identical to the Samsung M2625D for output quality in my tests as well. Text was easily good enough for any business needs, with scores falling in the middle of a fairly tight range that includes the vast majority of mono laser printers.

Graphics and photos were both absolutely typical for a mono laser. For graphics output, that translates to being suitable for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, however, you may or may not consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. For photos, par quality means being able to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages and print photos in general at roughly newspaper-level photo quality.

The Samsung Xpress M2825DW is a strong contender not because of any particularly impressive feature, but because of a constellation of features that fit together well. It’s not quite fast as the Brother HL-2270DW, for example, but it delivers a highly attractive balance of speed, output quality, paper handling, and more. As a shared printer in a micro office, or a personal printer that also makes mobile printing easy, that overall balance makes the Samsung Xpress M2825DW an easy pick for Editors’ Choice.

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