Samsung ML-2525 review

Desktop mono laser printers may not be the most exciting of Mac peripherals, but they can be a sound alternative to an inkjet if your main use is business correspondence. A budget mono laser, like Samsung's ML-2525, needn't cost as much as important limbs, either, as it comes in at well under £100.

This is a compact printer, although not quite as compact as it looks. Samsung has cleverly designed the case with a big, black bulge at the back, hiding the power supply and the rear end of the paper tray. The bulge is just small enough that it can't be seen from most angles at the front, so the printer appears very compact.

The paper tray takes 250 sheets of paper, so you can fill it with half a ream every so often and keep maintenance down to a minimum. There's also a single-sheet feed slot just above the tray for special-purpose media and envelopes.

The top surface of the printer is the almost obligatory high-gloss black plastic, but here it has a regular pattern of small dots set into it, which gives it more individual style. There are two main control buttons for power and to stop a print job, as well as two indicators for data and status conditions, such as paper jams and an empty tray.

The final button on the case is a little bit special, though, as it automatically prints the currently selected window on your screen. Press it for longer than a couple of seconds and it prints the whole screen instead. OK, it's not too difficult to print a screen anyway, but having a one-press button on the printer makes it even simpler.

The single-piece drum and toner cartridge slots in from the front once you've pulled down the front panel, which takes just a few moments. The front cover itself feels a little fragile, but only has to be opened when you're exchanging cartridges.

The only data connection to the machine is a single USB socket, but at this price you wouldn't really expect more. The driver and Samsung's status app install in a few minutes and once in place provide the functions you would expect.

One of the most impressive features of the ML-2525 is its print speed. Although this depends on whether the printer is sleeping before receiving the print datastream, at its fastest it handled our 10-page text print job in just 41 seconds - a speed of 14.63 pages per minute (ppm). The five-page text and graphics document was a little slower, at 8.1ppm, and neither of these speeds approaches Samsung's rating of 24ppm. Even so, it compares very well with rival mono lasers that come in at a similar price.

Nearly as impressive was the printer's document quality. Black text looked almost letterpress, with no noticeable spatter and very precisely controlled curves and diagonals from its 600 x 1200dpi print engine. Greyscale graphics were also surprisingly good, with less patchiness than that produced by some of its competitors. However, as with other Samsung lasers we've examined, the number of greys produced to differentiate between colour shades in the source document was too small, so some shades were repeated with the same greys.

Our test photo print wasn't too bad, either, with plenty of foreground detail, but there was some loss of clarity in shadowed areas of the image. It's all too easy for a mono laser to translate dark greys to solid black.

The temptation for printer makers selling machines at entry-level prices is to recoup their costs and make profit on the consumables. To its credit, Samsung holds back on this with its drum and toner cartridges. These are available in two yields; 1500 and 2500 pages and, at Internet prices, the high-yield version gives a cost per page of 2.1p. This really isn't high for a print from an inexpensive laser printer and the relatively high yield of the cartridges means you won't be changing them too often, which keeps the maintenance costs down, too.