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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Very good
Detailed editors' rating - Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 9 reviews
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Product summary
The good: Inexpensive; expandable paper-handling options; network ready; fast print speeds; excellent print quality.
The bad: Autoduplexing costs extra.
The bottom line: With its low cost of consumable, fast print speeds, and excellent print quality, the Samsung ML-3051N is an excellent mono laser printer for a small office with multiple users.
Specifications: Printer Type: Workgroup printer - Laser - Monochrome ; Max media size: A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in) , Legal (8.5 in x 14 in) ; Connectivity technology: Wired ; See full specs
See all products in the Samsung ML-3050 mono laser printer series
CNET editors' review
- Reviewed on: 10/13/2006
The simple control panel underscores the printer's basic functionality. Five buttons help you navigate the intuitive menu: menu, OK, back, and two direction keys. The remaining buttons include a toner save button, a demo button, and a job cancel button.
The ML-3051N has an impressive array of paper-handling features for such a low price. A 250-sheet paper cassette pulls out from the bottom and can handle up to legal-size paper. (When using legal-size sheets, the paper cassette will stick out a bit from the rear of the printer.) A second 250-sheet paper cassette is available as an option. Folding down a flap on the front of the printer reveals the multipurpose tray, which can hold up to 50 sheets of plain paper. Likewise, you have two options for output: a deep well in the top of the printer serves as the main output, while a door in the rear of the printer covers the straight pass-through output, handy for thicker media such as card stock.The ML-3051N's features are on a par with its price. Both the ML-3051N and the ML-3051ND models come standard with three connection options: USB, Ethernet, and a parallel connector, and support both Windows and Mac OSs. Wireless networking is available as an add-on option. The printer houses a 400MHz processor and comes with 64MB of RAM standard, which you can expand up to 320MB. On the ML-3051N, duplexing is a manual operation, but a built-in duplexer comes with the more expensive ML-3051ND. The Lexmark C500n is priced on a par with the ML-3051ND but lacks a duplexer, and its memory is not expandable; on the other hand, it does print color.
The entire front panel of the printer swings down to reveal the single black toner cartridge. Replacing it is simply a matter of pulling out the used cartridge by its handle and inserting a new one. The toner save button on the control panel allows you to reduce the amount of toner used on each page, saving you money; obviously, less toner also means lower print quality. The standard toner cartridge prints about 4,000 pages, while the high-yield cartridge prints twice that. Samsung estimates that it costs a mere 1.5 cents to print a page of black text. Using the toner-save feature, the per-page cost drops to an impressively low 1.07 cents per page.The Samsung ML-3051N fell short of Samsung's claim of 30 pages per minute (ppm), but its speed still impressed us. It printed black text at a rate of 19.22ppm and grayscale graphics at 18.16ppm, outpacing the more expensive Oki C3400n and about equal with the more expensive Lexmark C500n.
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If there's one thing you can count on with a mono laser printer, it's excellent text print quality, and the ML-3051N is no exception. In CNET Labs' tests, letters showed smooth, sharp edges, and were legible down to very small point sizes, about 2.5 to 3 points. The ML-3051N also excelled with grayscale graphics: it scaled smoothly from darker grays to lighter shades and exhibited good detail in the photo elements. We did see some cross-hatching in the graphic and photo elements, but that's to be expected from a laser printer.
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- Average user rating: 2.5 stars out of 9 reviews
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