Product Reviews

Samsung has clearly thought hard about the aesthetics of the elegant ML 1630W laser printer, so it's odd that it has lumbered it with such a cumbersome name. Regardless, this will sit well alongside the latest Macs, and its modest dimensions mean it will fit in any small home office.

It's a pity that the output tray detaches from the body rather than retracting into it for safe keeping, but this is a minor grumble. Just remember to position the printer so that the tray doesn't jut over the edge of your desk.

Samsung has worked hard to eliminate ugly buttons and display panels from the ML-1630W, and at first glance you'd be forgiven for thinking it had discarded them completely. In fact, it has incorporated touch-sensitive buttons and an LED display, which are only visible when the printer is in use. One button cancels the current print job, while holding a finger on the power button for a few seconds causes the printer to play a little tune as it goes to sleep.

Located just below Samsung's logo on the top of the printer is a context-sensitive matrix of blue dots that displays the number of pages of a job that have printed. These switch to an animated arrow if a problem occurs, or to one of four red-lit icons, which indicate low paper or ink, a jam and other errors. We encountered one jam during our tests and printing resumed at the last page as soon as it was cleared.

The printer can be connected directly via USB as well as Ethernet, or 802.11b and 802.11g, advertising itself over Bonjour, so that it automatically appears as a bookmark in Safari. Even over a network, installation is a breeze from a Mac.

Administration is handled through a web browser with comprehensive features divided into five major categories: Information, Machine Settings, Network Settings, Maintenance and Support. The main drawback here is the lack of explanation of technical terms.

One useful feature is the printer's ability to send emails. This means notifications

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can be sent to a system administrator, a key user and a service engineer, with a choice of who receives ink and paper alerts, a notification that maintenance is due and other alerts including paper jams.

Adding the printer to a wireless network can be done in a short wizard that shows available networks and signal strength, giving the opportunity to move the printer to a more reliable location. We encountered no problems with this method, though a more detailed manual route is also available.

Our tests were conducted over USB to eliminate network conditions as a factor in printing speeds. Samsung believes you'll get up to 16 A4 pages per minute (ppm) and our 50-page plain text document at the default setting of 600dpi corroborated this almost exactly. Neither a 12-page Excel worksheet nor a 24-page DTP layout fell below 15 pages per minute, while the speed rose to just over 18ppm for five copies of a four-page DTP document.

They're fine speeds for use in a home or small office, though heavy duty use will be held back by the 100-sheet paper tray and 30-sheet capacity of the output tray. The printer is a little short in stature and we would have liked it to have a little extra height just to provide a more capacious input tray for networked use.

The driver offers 600dpi and effective 1200dpi resolutions, with dithering in gradients only becoming visible upon very close inspection, but there was slight banding noticeable in images heavy with gradients. Text retained sharp, well-defined edges at various weights, and capitalised and mixed-case text was readable all the way down to 4pt. Straight lines retained their fidelity and clarity all the way down to 0.01pt.

Quietness doesn't quite match Samsung's boast of silent printing on the case, but the company at least makes it clear that this means a noise level of 45dB. The sheet feeding mechanism is still audible in close proximity, but anyone sat nearby in a small office won't be terribly distracted.

A toner cartridge should yield 2000 standard pages and can be found online for about £46. This works out at over 2p per page, which is expensive for mono laser prints, and the cartridge supplied in the box is a smaller 1000-page starter cartridge. By the time we'd printed 150 sheets, the supply level indicator had dropped just a little further than we expected.

Print quality, easy configuration using Bonjour and a reasonable printing speed are all laudable attributes, but the cost per page mean the ML-1630W will be best for those with very modest page counts.