Samsung SCX-4600 review

The introduction of fast, inexpensive and economical colour inkjets like HP's Officejet 6000 has stolen some of the small business market that was traditionally dominated by compact laser printers. However, if colour isn't a necessity and you'd rather avoid the hidden costs of colour inkjet and laser printers that use a little of each colour every time they print, then compact mono laser printers and MFPs still have certain advantages.

Samsung's SCX-4600 is a cheap and compact mono laser MFP with all the features your home office is likely to need. Its combination of a 600x600dpi laser printer with a 1,200x1,200dpi scanner is basic but functional. It connects to your PC via USB, has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 12,000 pages and a 250-sheet paper tray.

The SCX-4600 is simple to set up and use – it’s just a matter of installing the driver and plugging it in. The driver's Basic settings let you chose between standard 600dpi print quality and Best quality mode. This produces an effective resolution of 1,200dpi by adding extra detail to problematic areas like fine curves. Elsewhere, you can choose your paper or envelope size, add watermarks and enable a toner saving mode.

The TWAIN scanner interface software is similarly easy to use, but a surprising number of advanced image adjustment options are available, including colour profiles, brightness, contrast, highlight and gamma controls and basic artefact removal. The interface remains open between scans, making it easy to batch-scan multiple pages.

Scan quality is excellent. A document scanned at 300dpi had sharp text and richly coloured illustrations, although 150dpi scans suffered from slightly fuzzy text. 600dpi and 1,200dpi photo scans were finely detailed and their colours were accurate, if slightly muted. Scan speeds were fairly quick, too, at 18 seconds for a 300dpi A4 scan and 21 seconds for a 600dpi photo scan. Copy quality is also good, although we had to switch the MFP to its lightest copy mode to prevent a richly coloured illustration from appearing too dark in our copies.

Print quality is among the best we've seen from a personal mono laser. Photos were smoothly shaded and clear, which makes this a good choice if you produce a lot of illustrated mono documents. Graphs and line drawing are solidly shaded, but we recommend using the enhanced Best resolution to avoid jagged lines. Sharp text prints emerged at a swift 20ppm – just 2ppm below Samsung's quoted speed. Even tiny fonts were easily legible.

The SCX-4600 is cheap to run if you don't print very heavily. Its 2.1p typical cost per page isn't particularly cheap, but the MFP costs remarkably little to buy, which makes it a great deal if you expect to print less than 21,000 pages over a typical three-year working life (580 pages per month). It's an even better deal than Brother's DCP-7030, as it doesn't have the hidden cost of a separate imaging drum.