Performance
Although the ML-2851 isn't much to look at, it really shows its colors in both speed and text print quality. It's fairly rare to see a printer crank out text, graphics, and PowerPoint presentations at the same speed, but this Samsung printed about 20 pages per minute across the board. You can see below that it compared very admirably against two speedy competitors. It placed second in all of the categories to the top-performing Lexmark E350d, but the two came very close in our presentation and black text tests. Conversely, the Samsung printed much faster than Dell's 1720dn.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Presentation | |
Black Graphics | |
Black Text |
Like most monolasers, the Samsung text quality results were superb, with dark lines and even thickness in bold fonts and large lettering. Navigating through the driver, you'll find options to "Print all text to black" and "Print all text to darken," which do exactly that: They allow the printer to make dark lines and text even darker, enhancing those solid characters for extra emphasis. The mono graphics page, however, was not without its shortcomings. The black-to-white gradations were marred with both vertical and horizontal lines, and we noticed muddy patches dumped throughout the page, most notably on large blocks of black color. Portrait shots were tolerable, and the graphic characters were on par with text quality; lasers aren't meant for heavy graphics anyway, so overall we were happy with the results.
Service and Support
Samsung supports the ML 2851ND with a one-year limited warranty and toll-free tech support. Samsung's online Support Center also offers a how-to guide, an FAQ, and software downloads including drivers, manuals, and firmware updates.
Find out more about how we test printers.
What You'll Pay
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