For the money, it works
Written: Jan 08 '05 (Updated Jan 08 '05)
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Pros: Cheap, fast, decent capacity tray, better for graphics than some believe.
Cons: Starter cartridge doesn't last the advertised 1000 pages; noisy; absolutely murders envelopes.
The Bottom Line: It's got its problems, but it's probably the best single choice in the budget-laser category hands down, and definitely worth the money.
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| lossf's Full Review: Samsung ML1740 Laser Printer |
I've had this printer for about four months. It would warrant no more than 3 stars if not for the fact that, after the frequently-offered rebate, it can be had for $99. In laser terms, a $99 printer probably should be absolute garbage. The 1740 is much better than garbage-- just keep in mind that it does have its quirks and limitations. But for such an inexpensive laser, this Samsung is very good.
I used to own an NEC Superscript 860 circa 1997-- a $400 b/w laser bargain in its time-- that I loved dearly and that gave me four years of bulletproof service. I never even had to change the original cartridge-- and I printed on that thing a lot. Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Windows XP, my graphics suddenly started looking absolutely terrible. When I contacted NEC to inquire, they stated that the 860 was driven by proprietary Adobe graphics technology-- technology that Adobe had opted to discontinue with the advent of Windows 2000. My heart was broken, and the printer went to a friend running Windows 98, who to my knowledge is still using it to this day. I sure do wish NEC was still in the low-end laser game, as all of the present value-laser offerings fall well short of my little 860.
After the NEC's demise, budget concerns led me to a Canon S300 inkjet, which was an excellent printer for the money, and totally changed my opinion of inkjet printers. But although the S300 was shockingly clean in its print quality and the ink was also much cheaper than the inkjets of years past, I still missed the speed and cleanliness of laser print when printing up a score or an exam.
I experimented with a few budget lasers during these years-- like the 1740's predecessor, the 1710-- but was always extremely disappointed with their graphics performance, which was excessively jagged and blocky, even with the black-and-white vector-based graphics I tend to print out (I'm a musician and postsecondary educator; most of the graphics I trade in are things like music notation and Visio diagrams). So these printers always ended up going right back to the shop, and I stuck with my $90 S300, whose graphic abilities were smooth as silk by comparison.
I moved to another school for doctoral studies. Said school had near-fascist policies governing access to the department's photocopy machines, making it nearly impossible to get small quantities of handouts and such printed for my classes unless I had the materials ready at least two days before the class session (which I rarely do!). Then my beloved S300 started to die. I'd hoped to buy a $300 or $400 laser to match my old NEC, but this market segment no longer exists save for a handful of HP offerings-- and I won't buy HP consumer-grade equipment (unpredictable reliability, terrible drivers and terrible service and support, in my humble but fairly extensive experience).
So it was time to try out the new ML-1740. Much to my surprise, this printer was a huge improvement over the 1710-- although it also wasn't quite as compact, alas. But for the bigger (and still somewhat diminuitive) footprint, you do get a very nice 250-sheet-capacity paper tray-- a feature lacking in nearly all of the budget lasers presently on the market. And also much to my surprise, the 1740 loads from this tray very cleanly, unlike many budget lasers and inkjets. In larger print jobs, the 1740 rarely misfeeds sheets; worst-case-scenario, it loads two sheets at once and simply leaves the back page blank, with the top copy printed perfectly.
Vector graphics (line drawings and notation, etc.) don't look bad at all-- very little of the jaggedness that plagued the 1710 on similar jobs. You don't really buy a black-and-white budget laser to print raster graphics (i.e., photos), but those look a good deal more decent than I expected as well. As many 1740 reviewers have noted, text looks extremely clean, and I have to assume that anyone looking at one of these is primarily going to be dealing in text.
Print speed is very fast-- I'm used to assuming that the PPM rating is an exaggeration, but I've repeatedly printed out 30 copies of a handout and had them all in my hands in 2 minutes or so. (Unfortunately, now I take advantage of this ability and end up finishing my handouts some thirty minutes before class starts.)
Now for the complaints. As good as the 1740 is for standard paper, and even at dealing with accidentally-misfed "sheet clusters," it is absolutely terrible at printing envelopes. Standard envelopes must be fed one at a time through the front of the printer at the manual feed slot, using the sheet-size-adjustment guide. But no matter what I've tried or what kind of envelopes I've used, the 1740 has a really hard time loading the envelope in the first place. Sometimes it takes two or three tries to make it load, even though the 1740 will grab the envelope forcibly from you... and then it will sit there. If there's paper in the tray, often the 1740 will grab onto the envelope, then abruptly switch to the tray and print your "envelope" on a sheet of paper. You'd think even $99 printers would be smarter than this.
When you do finally get the stupid thing to load the right piece of paper and the product emerges, the resulting envelope is usually badly creased as if it's gone through the ringer (particularly on the back), and the address is very lightly printed-- often printed at an angle to boot. My handwriting being near-illegible at this point, if I did any more US Mail business than I do, I'd probably have to buy a separate inkjet just to do envelopes. It's just that bad. Thankfully, we live in the era of the electronic bill.
I have not tried the 1740 with Avery labels and the like, but I have a feeling its manual-feed performance on those is somewhere between its great paper-pickup abilities and absolutely awful job with standard envelopes. Beware if you need to print a lot of things like this.
One thing that makes me really angry and which kept me out of the budget-laser segment for a long time is the recent phenomenon of the "starter cartridge." One can't presently buy a sub-$700 laser without being saddled with one of these quarter-filled wonders-- as if the lower capacity of "full" modern laser toner cartridges weren't enough of an insult! (My 860 was rated at 5000 pages for a cart, while the Samsung 17xx series are rated at only 3000-- but to be fair, the cost of a replacement Samsung cartridge is also significantly lower than the NEC carts ever were.)
Like most starter cartridges, the one that comes with the 1740 in the box is supposed to get you to 1000 pages. However, I've generated only about 500 pages with this printer-- at about 5-7% coverage, average for a home user-- and the starter cartridge already visibly needs replacement.
If I'm upset about anything regarding the 1740, I'm pretty hacked off at Samsung about this. Toner is so cheap for the manufacturers, with a full cartridge probably costing them about twenty cents more than the not-quite-full cartridge shipping with the printer. It's clear as day why they don't fill these things up all the way-- here we may witness the icky Playstation sort of business model (sell the hardware at a small loss, make tons of money off the games... or in this case, $90 toner cartridges). But Samsung is hardly the only printer manufacturer playing this game. If this sadly common policy of lure-'em-in-cheap-then-milk-them-dry were a crime, then HP's entire R&D team would be serving 30 to life... for their inkjets alone.
While it doesn't exactly scream, the 1740 is unpleasantly loud in operation-- markedly louder than my previous inkjet! The noise is sort of a nice "feature" when I'm wirelessly printing documents around the house from my laptop, since I know that it received my command and the job is being done. When I'm sitting right in front of it, though, I just can't wait for it to go back to sleep.
And that's another concern: occasionally, maybe once out of every 20 or 30 print jobs, the printer goes to sleep, then won't wake back up the next time you print. The driver won't have a clue what's going on and won't alert you to any errors, usually, either-- you sit there waiting for your job to emerge, with no clue that the printer is in a coma. The solution is easy enough, I suppose: turn 'er off and back on from the power switch, and your document comes out automatically with no further trouble. I still find it pretty annoying, especially since I have the 1740 way up on top of my very tall desk rig and have to spend way too much time feeling around for the power switch.
One final and very minor concern also concerns waking up, although this may not be a concern to you if you own a home with electrical wiring par excellence. The lights in my apartment (the circuits in which are normally quite stable) visibly flicker when this "EnergyStar" printer comes back online. Although they stabilize immediately thereafter, I'm just waiting for this process to knock over a circuit breaker. Well, I guess this is why I use a UPS with my computer, right?
All in all, the 1740 is an excellent value and will do the trick nicely for 95% of light-medium home office users. If you want laser speed and print quality at budget-inkjet prices, you really don't have many other options... and budget lasers being budget lasers, spending the extra $50 or $100 on one of the competing offerings from HP or Minolta would be ill-advised, methinks. The 1740 will definitely do until the next killer budget laser comes along-- or until NEC decides to get back into the game!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
lossf
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Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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