Product Reviews

Samsung's ML-1915 is one of the neatest little mono laser printers we've seen for a while. Designed for individual use, it hasn't the designer chic of the low and lovely ML-1630W, but it still manages to look smaller than the paper it prints on by the simple expedient of hiding part of the paper tray in a bulge out the back, which you can't easily see from the front.

That paper tray can take up to 250 sheets, so with the kinds of use at which the ML-1915 is aimed, it won't need to be restocked every few days - and possibly not even every few weeks. A flip-up paper stop on top lifts the sheets as they feed out, so they're particularly easy to grab when a job's finished outputting.

The controls sit to the right of the output slot on the top panel, and these comprise three indicators and three buttons. Two of the buttons are for power and to stop a printing job, but the third one is more unusual - in fact, unique as far as we're aware. With the printer connected to a Mac, a press of the print screen button automatically sends a copy of the active window, scaled to fit the paper, to the ML-1915. Hold down the button for more than three seconds and it prints the whole of the screen. At least, that's the way it should work.

With our review sample, there was no reaction to a short press, while a long press produced the message 'USB printer not found. Please add printer'. The printer had happily printed all our previous test documents, and was set as the default. Samsung assured us the feature was intended to work under Mac OS X as well as Windows, and also said it hadn't come across the problem before. Perhaps it was some glitch in our particular

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installation.

Setup of the ML-1915 is as simple as folding down the front panel, inserting the combined drum and toner cartridge, and installing the drivers and status monitor app. The software is on the supplied CD, so there's no need to download anything.

Samsung claims a speed of 18ppm for this printer and that's not too much of an exaggeration. While our five-page text and graphics page produced a speed of 9.38ppm, the 10-page black text document took 44 seconds to complete, giving a speed of 13.6ppm. It also produced a 15cm x 10cm photo on an A4 sheet in 14 seconds, so you're not going to be hanging around long for typical day-to-day correspondence.

Print quality is generally very good. Text comes through clean and densely black, with very little sign of spatter. Even at small point sizes, it's sharp and very readable, thanks to the 600dpi x 1200dpi resolution. Inverted text is also clear, with no unwanted in-fills.

There's little sign of banding in greyscale fills from business graphics, either, with clean dither patterns giving smooth backdrops. However, the problem with the greys is the reduced number of shades so that, for example, the three different colours in our test page all produced the same greyscale equivalent, so there was no visual differentiation between them.

Our test photo print benefited from the clean greyscale patterns, but also suffered from the reduced range of greyscales and from darker shades tending to black, which removed some of the image detail. However, the workload of most mono lasers doesn't involve many photo images.

The ML-1915 comes with a 700-page 'starter' cartridge, which is another way of saying Samsung wants you to start buying consumables as soon as possible. The regular cartridges print either 1500 or 2500 ISO pages; using the 2500 high-yield one produces a page cost of around 2.2p. This isn't at all bad for this class of printer - Samsung isn't trying to make up for the low purchase price of this machine by stinging you for its consumables.

Overall, the Samsung ML-1915 is a great little low-cost mono laser printer, with decent capacity, reasonable print quality - certainly for its core use as a text printer - good speed and a neat appearance.