Samsung ML-1665 review

Measuring just 184x341x224mm with its paper trays closed, Samsung's tiny ML-1665 mono laser printer is one of the smallest printers we've ever seen. It's not designed for heavy workloads; a maximum monthly duty cycle of just 5,000 pages means that it's unlikely to withstand regularly printing more than a few hundred pages a month. It has a 150 sheet input tray, 100 sheet output tray and connects to your PC via USB.

If you only require a low yield printer, the ML-1665's small size makes it ideal for a home office. The printer has just two buttons: one for power and one to instantly print the contents of your screen. This is only useful if you keep the printer within arm's reach of your monitor, though. Should you wish to do so, the printer looks unobtrusive and runs quietly.

Print quality is excellent, as we've come to expect from Samsung's mono lasers. Mono text is clean, sharp and perfect. Greyscale shading was excellent in the illustrations from our sample set of business documents. The only flaws in the quality of our prints were very minor: there was a little graininess and visible half-toning in photos, and we noticed a couple of tiny jagged imperfections in the fine, smooth curves in a couple of our line graphs.

Print speeds aren't amazingly quick, but 14.7ppm for mono text is fast enough for personal use. Our illustrated business documents printed at 13.7ppm, while photographic prints emerged at 13.3ppm. The printer defaults to its enhanced 600x1,200dpi print resolution – reducing it to its native 600x600dpi doesn't provide a significant speed boost, so there's no reason to do this.

The ML-1665 comes with a 700 page starter cartridge. Toner and OPC drum are both integrated into the cartridge, so there's only one consumable to change. At £42, the 1,500 page MLT-D1042S replacement toner cartridges seem quite cheap, but are actually rather poor value - a page costs 2.8p to print, which is more expensive than most compact mono laser printers.

Despite this, if you're not a heavy user the ML-1665 has a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) thanks to its cheap purchase price. At just £68, there are few cheaper printers, which helps to produce a TCO of £152 over three years' light use (100 pages per month). Unfortunately, the ML-1665 doesn't remain such good value if your printing requirements are higher. A medium print load of 750 pages a month over three years will give you a whopping £842 TCO.

If you only plan on printing very lightly, the ML-1665 is a good choice, as it costs very little to buy. It's not as cheap to run as our favourite personal mono laser, the Epson Aculaser M1200, but it also doesn't have any extra consumables to worry about. It's not quite a Budget Buy winner, but this inexpensive and good-looking mono laser won't disappoint if your printing requirements are light.