A Fresh Page Every Five Seconds
Except for the toner-save button, the only controls on the printer itself are the handy-dandy one-page demo-printout button (also used to start each page of a manual-feed job) and a button to cancel a job in progress. Tapping the latter also reprints just the last page of any job, even if you've shut down the application or switched off your PC; it's a convenient way to get another copy of a one-page letter.
Most printer options are controlled by Samsung's software driver, which earns an "okay but not as friendly as consumer ink-jet drivers" rating. It installs from the supplied CD-ROM simply and speedily enough, but you're not ready to print when it's done -- for our USB connection, we still had to insert the cable and step through Windows' Add New Hardware Wizard, referring the latter to the Samsung CD again. Similarly, the owner's manual is a nicely detailed, 126-page affair, but it's not paper; it's an Adobe Acrobat file which you must either view with the CD in your drive or hunt through several subdirectories to find and copy to your PC's hard disk.
Driver settings are handled (or buried) within Windows applications' Print / Printer Properties dialog boxes, and include routine choices (portrait or landscape, automatic or manual feed, number of copies) as well as some extra options.
You can print at 300 instead of 600 dpi, try slightly lighter or darker grayscale images, scale an oversized document to fit a page, or print a page across an overlapping grid of up to six by six sheets to create posters. You can shrink two, four, nine, or 16 thumbnail pages onto a sheet for handouts, or print grayed-out, watermark text such as "Confidential" or "First Draft" in the background of every page. We managed to crash Microsoft Works changing the font for watermarks, but had no problems in other applications.
As for performance, the littlest laser held its own with our big corporate office model (if you don't mind the lack of a network server). Ink-jets are quicker to spit out the first page of a print job -- the ML-1210 took from 10 seconds for a short text memo to 25 seconds for the cover of its Acrobat manual -- but once running, the Samsung chugged away at or close to its rated 12 ppm: a six-page text document took 40 seconds, while 50 pages of mixed text and graphics took four minutes and 50 seconds.
Fancy PostScript lasers, naturally, outclass its 8MB of RAM and 66MHz processor, but we didn't notice Windows working too hard while programs printed in the background, and even our 50-page print job blanked the "Printing" pop-up and returned application control to us after two of its approximately five minutes.
Text quality (apart from toner-saving mode) was, well, laser-class, even on generic copier paper -- dark, crisp, sharp characters both in banner headlines and type as small as 6 points. Excel charts and small newsletter illustrations and photos looked fine, too, though full-page photo images looked predictably gray and cross-hatchy.
But (sound of forehead slap, "D'oh!") you're not going to use any monochrome printer to frame photos for your mantel. You're going to use it for classy correspondence or resumes or your next book manuscript -- and for handling those text-intensive jobs, with frugal purchase and refill costs and a sturdy duty cycle of 5,000 pages per month, the Samsung ML-1210 is hard to top. We can quibble about more intuitive software and a fuller starter cartridge, but we know a great deal when we see one.
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