One Page at a Time
Samsung calls its SCX-4100 a "Digital Productivity Center," probably because "Monochrome Productivity Center" wouldn't sound as sexy. But black-and-white laser printers are still smart choices for high-volume handling of business correspondence and other documents, and the vast majority of office copiers are monochrome.
So combining a workhorse laser with a copier and scanner makes desk-space-saving sense -- especially with a low price of $199 plus lower costs per page than today's ubiquitous color inkjet printer/scanner/copiers. Unfortunately, though we won't knock the SCX-4100 for lacking color printouts, we'll knock it for lacking one or two other things.
Pennies Per Page
Though a bit slower than the latest personal lasers -- it's rated at 15 pages per minute with 600 by 600 dpi resolution, versus 17 ppm for Samsung's ML-1740 -- the 21-pound SCX-4100 shows the company's skill at building compact printers: It stands just over 9 inches tall with a footprint of 16 by 17 inches, though you'll want to allow some extra space behind for the swing-up door that gives a straight-through paper path for the single-sheet or -envelope feeding slot above the main paper drawer.
The latter pulls out from the bottom front just like a big printer or copier's, though not as deep -- it holds 250 letter- or legal-sized sheets. Unless you've opened the rear door, pages perform a backflip to exit face down in a shallow 50-sheet output tray or cubbyhole beneath the flatbed scanner.
Samsung says the printer can accommodate two users -- Windows or Linux PCs (but no Macs) plugged into its parallel and USB ports -- but it doesn't come with parallel or USB cables, a network adapter, or a way to expand its onboard memory past the provided 8MB.
Aside from loading paper, the only other setup chore is flipping down the front panel to insert the combination toner cartridge and drum, which takes about 10 seconds. Each replacement cartridge costs $80 and is good for roughly 3,000 pages, which divides out to a frugal 2.7 cents per page -- but Samsung continues to earn our boos and hisses for packaging a measly 1,000-page "starter" cartridge in the box.
The one-piece toner and drum design makes maintenance simple. Most small offices will never approach the Samsung's rated duty cycle of 10,000 pages per month, so it'll take some time to reach the 60,000-page mark at which the company suggests taking the SCX-4100 to the shop for paper-feeding and transfer roller and fuser-unit replacement -- a tune-up likely to cost enough to make you opt for buying a whole new $199 unit instead.
Events
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
