Samsung ML-2571N

Pros: Fast, Mac and PC Compatible, Very good quality print, built-in Ethernet

Cons: Loud while printing. Mac Postcript driver has few options.

Summary: I wanted a black and white laser printer to handle printing large PowerPoint presentations, product manuals and other multi-page documents. Mac and PC compatibilty was a must, as well as network attachment for use by multiple machines.

Setup and software installation for both Mac and PC environments was straight forward and trouble free. I just plugged it into an open port on my wireless router, and was good to go.

On my Wintel machines, the printer appears as a PCL compatible network printer. The driver has all the bells and whistles I expected.

On a Mac, the print driver is plain vanilla PostScript, with virtually no control of print options. Changing resolution or other paramters requires using the printers built-in web-based interface. Somewhat cumbersome, but I can live with it.

Warmup time from idle and print speed is outstanding for a printer in this class. At approximately 25 pages/minute the printer blasts through large documents in short order. I only use my Canon ink jet now when I really need a color printout.

The printer is rather loud...it sounds like a small jet when printing and the fan noise is substantial until it goes back to sleep in power save mode. If I printed stuff constantly throughout the day, it would probably be irritating, but given my print habits (4-5 large docs/day) it's usually idle, and is dead silent when so.

The factory toner isn't cheap but I was able to find it locally for $60 instead of the MSRP of $89. The "starter cartridge" that's included is only good for 1000 pages, but a full load of toner should last around 3000 or so. That's two cents/page which is pretty good in my book.

All in all, a good inexpensive OS/X & Windoze network printer for light to moderate use. I'm very happy with the 2571N. Your actual mileage may vary.