Samsung Smartjet review

The computer industry is all about compromise.

Although manufacturers would no doubt love to use only the best components in their equipment, price prohibits them. So they have to make concessions. They cut corners. And how cleverly they cut these corners ultimately determines how successful their product will be.

With the SmartJet, all the wrong corners have been cut and a few daft decisions have been made along the way. You start to realise this as soon as you install the software. Inserting the CD brings up a pleasant installation program with a pretty movie clip of a spinning globe turning into the Samsung logo. Once this is over with you're invited to install each component of the software bundle, including the printer driver, fax driver, fax program, and Presto! Page Manager. There's only one problem: each has to be installed separately. So after installing the fax drivers you're asked to reboot. Once rebooted, you have to load the installation program, watch the pretty movie again, and then install the next component. And then reboot. And then load the installation program. And then watch the movie again. Repeat ad infinitum.

It would have been better if a single click installed the entire suite in one fell swoop but no such option is available. If you haven't been driven mad yet, actually using the software will squeeze the remaining drops of sanity from your head.

The problem is that there's no central program from which to access the various components, unlike on other multifunction devices such as the Hewlett Packard LaserJet 3100. So, to send and receive faxes you have to use the Fax Remote Control program. To scan pictures you have to use the Presto! Page Manager. To make colour copies you have to use Presto! Copier.

Elsewhere, other dodgy decisions have been made. In order to fax documents from within Windows applications you have to install an entirely different suite of programs, WinFax Lite by Symantec, supplied not on the CD but on two floppy disks. WinFax isn't mentioned in the main manuals but has its own brief manual. By the time you've finished installing everything, your Start menu has doubled in size with new programs and your finger is sore from clicking so much.

We'd forgive these crimes against user-friendliness if the actual printer itself showed promise. But it doesn't. For starters, it's a CMY printer, meaning that whilst it comes with a colour and a black cartridge, both can't be installed at once. To print colour images after printing black text, you have to remove the black cartridge and put in the colour one. It's easy to get ink on your fingers doing this and considering you might do it several times during one session you get annoyed sooner rather than later.

We might even forgive this if the actual printing quality was any good. But it isn't. Colour prints were generally dark and dithering was very apparent, even on the Fine setting. The old curse of inkjet printing - banding - was also present, despite the 1,200x1,200 resolution. Black printing wasn't any better, with feathering apparent around text. Patches of what should have been black were more like a dark charcoal, despite the fact the paper was so saturated with ink that it dried crinkled.

It's possible to scan at up to 300dpi in 24-bit colour but our test results weren't up to much. Although scanned in at the full 300dpi, the edges of shapes were ragged. The colours were darker than they should have been too. This is down to the single-pass scanner head the SmartJet employs.