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Samsung ML-1665 review

Samsung ML-1665
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £68
inc VAT

The ML-1665 isn't designed for heavy printing but it's cheap and compact, with good print quality, making it a good option if you're looking for a personal laser printer.

Specifications

mono laser, 16ppm print speed, USB, 184x341x224mm

http://www.kikatek.co.uk

Measuring just 184x341x224mm with its paper trays closed, Samsung’s tiny ML-1665 mono laser printer is one of the smallest printers we’ve ever seen. It’s not designed for heavy workloads; a maximum monthly duty cycle of just 5,000 pages means that it’s unlikely to withstand regularly printing more than a few hundred pages a month. It has a 150 sheet input tray, 100 sheet output tray and connects to your PC via USB.

If you only require a low yield printer, the ML-1665’s small size makes it ideal for a home office. The printer has just two buttons: one for power and one to instantly print the contents of your screen. This is only useful if you keep the printer within arm’s reach of your monitor, though. Should you wish to do so, the printer looks unobtrusive and runs quietly.

Print quality is excellent, as we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s mono lasers. Mono text is clean, sharp and perfect. Greyscale shading was excellent in the illustrations from our sample set of business documents. The only flaws in the quality of our prints were very minor: there was a little graininess and visible half-toning in photos, and we noticed a couple of tiny jagged imperfections in the fine, smooth curves in a couple of our line graphs.

Print speeds aren’t amazingly quick, but 14.7ppm for mono text is fast enough for personal use. Our illustrated business documents printed at 13.7ppm, while photographic prints emerged at 13.3ppm. The printer defaults to its enhanced 600×1,200dpi print resolution – reducing it to its native 600x600dpi doesn’t provide a significant speed boost, so there’s no reason to do this.

The ML-1665 comes with a 700 page starter cartridge. Toner and OPC drum are both integrated into the cartridge, so there’s only one consumable to change. At £42, the 1,500 page MLT-D1042S replacement toner cartridges seem quite cheap, but are actually rather poor value – a page costs 2.8p to print, which is more expensive than most compact mono laser printers.

Despite this, if you’re not a heavy user the ML-1665 has a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) thanks to its cheap purchase price. At just £68, there are few cheaper printers, which helps to produce a TCO of £152 over three years’ light use (100 pages per month). Unfortunately, the ML-1665 doesn’t remain such good value if your printing requirements are higher. A medium print load of 750 pages a month over three years will give you a whopping £842 TCO.

If you only plan on printing very lightly, the ML-1665 is a good choice, as it costs very little to buy. It’s not as cheap to run as our favourite personal mono laser, the Epson Aculaser M1200, but it also doesn’t have any extra consumables to worry about. It’s not quite a Budget Buy winner, but this inexpensive and good-looking mono laser won’t disappoint if your printing requirements are light.

Basic Specifications

Rating ****
Maximum native print resolution 600x600dpi
Maximum enhanced print resolution 1,200x600dpi

Quoted Speeds

Quoted speed, mono A4 16ppm
Quoted warm-up time N/A
Quoted time to first page, mono 9s

Tested Speeds

Mono page from sleep time 1.0 12s
Letter, time to first page 1.0 11s
25-page mono document – total time 00:01:42
Time for 24 pages mixed greyscale 1.0 1m 45s
Time for two greyscale 10x8in photos 1.1 20s
Time for six greyscale 6x4in photos 1.0 27s

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfaces USB
Optional printer interfaces none
Size 184x341x224mm
Weight 5.0kg
Noise (in normal use) 49dB(A)
Duty cycle 5,000 pages

Paper Handling

Maximum paper size up to A4
Maximum paper weight 163gsm
Standard paper inputs 1
Standard paper input capacity 150
Maximum paper inputs 1
Maximum paper input capacity 150
Output tray capacity 100 sheets
Duplex (code, cost if option) No

General

Printer technology mono laser
Language(s) host-based
Supported operating systems Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/2003 Server/2008 Server, Mac OS X 10.3-10.6, Linux
Standard printer memory 8MB
Maximum printer memory 8MB
Other laser features and options £42

Buying Information

Price £68
Price per mono A4 page 2.80p
Price of 2nd paper cassette N/A
Capacity of supplied black toner 700 pages
Capacity of supplied drum(s) replaced with toner
Estimated mono TCO – three years light £152
Estimated mono TCO – three years medium £842
Estimated mono TCO – three years heavy £3092
Warranty two years RTB
Supplier http://www.kikatek.co.uk
Details www.samsung.co.uk

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two greyscale 10x8in photos 1.1 20s
Time for six greyscale 6x4in photos 1.0 27s