Samsung SCX-4500 review

If you want an MFP that prioritises looks as much as performance, Samsung's SCX-4500 could be for you.

Its shiny black surface is polished to a mirror finish. When we plugged it in, its surface lit up with blue LEDs to indicate its printing and scanning status.

It hinges open in the middle to load toner cartridges, with the paper tray and detachable output tray on the lower half of the printer. Everything seems crammed into too little space. The undersized paper tray holds just 100 sheets, so it feels like you're constantly refilling it if you do any reasonable amount of printing, and the output tray holds just 30 pages.

Samsung only lists the printer's maximum enhanced resolution of 600x600dpi, which usually shows that the native resolution is lower. Fortunately, print quality was generally good. Diagrams and illustrations were smooth and detailed. Photo-quality images weren't grainy and didn't suffer from serious banding, although some shading was lost on low-contrast images, leaving areas black. The smallest lettering in our font size test was readable, but slightly speckled and broken.

Copies were too dark at the printer's default settings, but it was easy to use the darkness adjustment option to correct this. The scanner interface was powerful and easy to use, although it didn't automatically crop scanned previews to the correct dimensions. Scanned colours were accurate and there was practically no loss of detail.

Print speeds were slow. It was fastest when printing text documents, managing 14.6ppm, but this is slower than most of the printers and MFPs here. We had to wait 21 seconds for our first page to print. It was faster in our mixed text and graphics print test with 10.9ppm, which was as quick as Canon's LBP2900B MFP. Print costs are average for an MFP.

The SCX-4500's print and scan quality were good and photocopies looked great after we adjusted the settings. It's also stylish, but for this price we'd have liked to see faster print speeds, a network port and a larger paper tray.