Samsung SCX-4600 review

A laser-based all-in-one for around £100 looks like a particularly good deal, but what can you get for that kind of money? Well, in the case of Samsung's SCX-4600, you get a surprisingly well-equipped multifunction machine that covers print, scan and copy bases.

Styled like a mini photocopier, all in textured black with gloss highlights, the vertical sides of the printer section flare at the top to accommodate the A4 flatbed scanner. The simple lid has no automatic document feeder, but does raise on its hinges to accommodate books as well as single sheets.

The control panel runs the full width of the device, giving plenty of room for the relatively small number of controls. The main one is a four-way button ring, with an OK button in the centre and a ring of four blue LEDs around the outside, which cycle round when the machine is printing. To the left of this is a two-line by 16-character LCD display, enough to give sensible status messages and easy menu navigation. To the right are buttons to start and stop copy jobs and for various mode settings. There's no front panel USB socket, which is a bit of a shame as walk-up printing is very handy on a personal machine like this.

Two unusual functions that compensate for this omission are web print, whereby the machine prints a copy of your current Mac screen from a single button on the control panel, and ID card copy, whereby scans of each side of a card can be combined on a single-page print. Both facilities are handy and unexpected on a machine at this price.

The main paper tray has a healthy 250-sheet capacity and there's a single-sheet, multi-purpose slot above this. Pages exit to a slot just beneath the scanner section of the unit and project out front by about 25mm, when they come to rest, so printed documents are easy to extract.

The scanner section can be hinged up slightly if you need to get a hand in to deal with paper jams, although we didn't experience any jams during testing.

The combined drum and toner cartridge slides in from the front once you've folded down the front panel, and it's extremely easy to replace. The only data connection at the back is USB 2, as the SCX-4600 has no network capability.

Samsung rates the machine at 22 pages per minute (ppm), which is wishful thinking, although we did see a maximum real-world speed of 13.3ppm on a 10-page black text document, which is quick for a budget machine. Even when printing text and graphics pages, it only dropped to 9ppm. A single-page copy took 14 seconds and a 15 x 10cm photo print on an A4 sheet was one second quicker, at 13 seconds.

Print quality from the SCX-4600 was very good. Text was dense and sharp, with no signs of toner spatter, and character had smooth contours, thanks to an enhanced resolution of up to 1200dpi. Greyscales were also excellent, with plenty of tone levels to reproduce different colours from an original. Greyscale copies were a bit on the blotchy side, but not too bad.

Using the high-yield, 2500 page cartridge gives a running cost of 2.7p per page, which isn't as high as some competitors.

The Samsung SCX-4600 really does offer excellent value for money for a Soho device.