Excellent Value printer
Written: Oct 02 '04 (Updated Mar 09 '05)
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Pros: Fast print speed, compact
Cons: none yet
The Bottom Line: This laser printer is an excellent value for home use.
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| wakiz's Full Review: Samsung ML1740 Laser Printer |
I chose a laser printer over an ink jet printer because of the overall costs of the printer and its operation. I have owned an inkjet printer in the past only to find that I seldom printed anything in color. When I didn't use it for a while, the ink would leak and clog the heads or evaporate. Then to clean the heads it would use even more ink. At $30-$45 for a cartridge, that printer started getting expensive. The black ink only lasts about 500 pages, which was mainly what I mainly used. A laser printer has a slightly higher initial cost, but costs less to operate. Since I need almost no color printing for school papers, a color inkjet is useless to me. Laser printer gray scale works fairly well if the graphic is well designed.
I just purchased this printer for $150 - $50 rebate a few weeks ago. For $100 I don't think that I can get a much better printer or value for that matter.
Setting up this printer was a snap. All that I had to do was remove the protective tape, install the toner, and plug in the power and USB cable. After that I turned it on and installed the drivers and my printer was up and running within 20 minutes of unpacking it from the box. I only ran it in Windows XP at first, but then realized that it's supported under Linux also. There are drivers included on the CD, and also supported natively using the driver for the ML 1710 printer.
The text print quality of this laser printer is very sharp. I have had the printer on toner save mode, which is supposed to extend the life of the cartridge about 40%. The text is still high quality with this setting. However, the text is a bit lighter, and there is less contrast. The print quality is good with the toner save off. It is very sharp and bold. For most of the printing I do, to include college papers, the toner save mode will more than suffice.
Gray scale and line art come out very good. There is some minute, but noticeable artifacts in the color wheel that I printed, but I will not be printing graphics much and this is not important to me. But I don't know if that artifact was in the graphic or was something done by the printer because I don't know what it is supposed to look like. It was a test page that I printed from Mandrake Linux 10.
This printer prints much faster than I expected. I didn't notice the 17 page per minute rating when I bought it. But I clocked it outputting closer to 20 ppm printing a text document. Graphics do not take noticeable longer than text.
The printer has a 250 sheet capacity slide out paper tray. I like this design better than Samsung's previous design where the paper sits at an angle. This way the paper doesn't end up getting curly from sitting too long. It is also less prone to gathering dust in the paper tract. There is also a single sheet feeder slot.
The normal output tray is on the top of the printer. There is a fold out extension on it. If the extension is not used, the paper in the output tray will get pushed off by the next printed sheet and fall in front of the printer. This is my one and only gripe about this printer.
There is also a single sheet output tray behind the printer for a straighter paper path for thicker media. I have not used this and cannot comment.
The printer is very compact and has a foot print no larger than a 15" x 15" square. Although more clearance is need for the input paper tray and straighter paper path.
My relative has an older Samsung 12xx printer that he bought for college. After three years, the printer still works very well and he's still on the original toner.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100 aft reba
Operating System: Linux
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Epinions.com ID:
wakiz
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Location: California
Reviews written: 28
Trusted by: 1 member
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