Samsung ML-1640 review

Inkjets are great all-rounders for home use, switching seamlessly from outputting prints for the family album to running off a letter to the bank manager.

But if plain black documents are what you need, and you tend to need a lot of them, the speed and low running costs of a mono laser printer could make more sense. In the past, the trade-off was that they were a lot more expensive to buy, but machines like Samsung's new ML-1640 are now bringing the convenience of a laser-powered office workhorse within reach of any user.

The Samsung makes no attempt to hide its workaday nature: it's square and squat, and the only things punctuating its monochrome exterior are a button and a couple of LEDs on the top. The black finish may appeal more than the usual beige, though. Paper is collected in an output tray on the roof, leaving sheets neatly collated and supported flat, rather than spilling out from an overstuffed front or rear-mounted tray, as with most inkjets.

The ML-1640 only prints in black and white, so our primary concern was the quality of text and simple line art. We weren't disappointed. Text was black and crisp, fine strokes such as the serifs being delicately reproduced without becoming spidery. Speed was good, too: our 10 page text document appeared in 39 seconds, pretty much bang-on the claimed 16 pages per minute output rate, which isn't super-fast by laser standards but better than most inkjets.

Images obviously aren't the forte of a mono laser, but we gave the Samsung a run at our photo tests to see how well it could reproduce continuous tones. At its highest 1200dpi setting, the ML-1640 produced nicely graduated greyscales. Images appeared a little dark, but this is something that can be rectified by making adjustments in the printer driver. Dropping the resolution to 600dpi left images looking rather broken up, with tones appearing more bunched together, leading to occasional stepping in what should have been smooth gradations. On larger, heavy patches of greyscale images, some very faint banding was evident on a few prints.

All round, though, we were more than happy with the print quality for a machine at this price. The ML-1640 is a Best Buy budget laser.