Samsung SCX-4824FN review

Samsung's SCX-4824FN is a mid-range mono laser multi-function printer that comes in at an attractive price of just under £200.

Coloured in light and dark grey, it's perhaps a little dull for some Mac users, but its chunky, heavily curved look is still quite friendly. Travelling from top to bottom, there's a near-horizontal, 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) set into the lid of its A4 flatbed scanner.

In front of the scanner is a full-width control panel, which is well laid out and includes a two-line by 16-character LCD status display, a ring of navigation controls with an illuminated indicator ring around it and a number pad to the right for dialling fax numbers. At the extreme right are two buttons to start and stop a copy job.

Below the control panel is a large opening, reminiscent of the shuttle bay from some starship or other, which is where printed pages appear. The top half of the machine doesn't hinge up, as many do, so you need some way to get at any jammed pages - not that we saw any.

At the bottom of the front panel is a 250-sheet paper tray and above that is a fold-down cover, which reveals a single-sheet feed for special media, including envelopes. A second 250-sheet tray is available as an option, as is extra memory, although no duplexer is available for the machine.

At the back of the SCX-4824FN are sockets for USB and Ethernet, as well as for a fax line and an external handset. You can fax either directly from the scanner or send documents from your Mac.

Physical setup of the printer is straightforward, as the drum and toner cartridge is the only consumable. This slots in once you've pull down the front cover to give access to the inside of the machine. Cartridges are available with 2000 and 5000 page yields, although a 700-page 'starter' cartridge is provided in the box.

Software installation is also simple, and the SmarThru application that handles scanning and copying is installed as well as a driver. We had trouble getting the device to print under Mac OS X 10.5.6: although printing files would appear to be transferred to the printer and it would start up and warm its fuser, it never actually fed paper or printed on it. An upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5.7 sorted this, but as the machine is quoted as working with version 10.3 and above, there could be a problem here.

Print speeds, while nowhere near the published figure of 24ppm, are good for this class of all-in-one. We saw a maximum speed of 17.1ppm on our 10-page test document and this was measured including processing and warm-up time. That's convenient for this machine, as warm-up from sleep mode can take longer than half a minute - annoying if you're after a quick, single-page print.

Print quality for black text was excellent, with clean, well-formed characters showing no signs of toner fuzz. Greyscale graphics were also a touch above the norm, with little in the way of banding and a good range of tones.

The only place the output fell down in our suite of tests was with photocopies. Copying greyscale material produced blotchy and irregular tones, while copies of photographs showed a preponderance of black, over which the darkness setting had little effect. Text copies were fine, though.

There's just one consumable, the drum and toner cartridge, which, as we've noted, is available in two yields. Using the high-yield cartridge, the page cost is just under 1.5p per page, which is very good for this class of printer. Some of its rivals can cost double this when printing.