Samsung ML-5100A review

Laser printers were once luxury items, the ultimate in print quality and speed.

Nowadays, the ability of inkjet printers to print colour at photographic quality has stolen some thunder from them. But when it comes to volume printing at speed, lasers still rule the roost. What's more, the current crop of budget lasers has put 8 pages-per-minute (ppm) performance within everyone's reach.

Samsung's new budget laser, the ML-5100A, is no exception to this trend, offering 8ppm print speeds, 600x600dpi resolution, 4Mb of memory and a 33MHz RISC processor, all for an expected street price of £169. There's even an enhanced 1,200x600dpi mode for top-quality output.

The ML-5100A certainly exhibits all the qualities of a well-built piece of machinery. The input and output trays extend at an angle from the top of the device and, unlike those found on most inkjet printers, feel particularly solid. Also, the fact that the printed paper isn't delivered to a tray in front of the printer means the 5100A is impressively compact, taking up just 345x364mm of precious desk space.

The controls on the printer itself are minimal, with all the advanced features taken care of by the driver software. Once you've connected the printer to your PC via the USB or parallel port and dropped the toner cartridge in, setup is pretty straightforward - although you do have to choose whether to install HP PCL6 or PCL5e emulations. PCL6 is newer, and generally delivers better-looking graphics, but in testing the Samsung ran out of memory when printing large graphics in this mode. We'd advise sticking to the old, but reliable PCL5e driver. Pity there's no suggestion of this in the rather unhelpful manual!

With this problem overcome, the Samsung turned out to be an admirable little machine, running through all the tests we could throw at it without breaking sweat. Standard text output at 600dpi backed up Samsung's claims of 8ppm print speed, and the first page was delivered in just 21 seconds. More demanding layouts with plenty of different fonts and graphics will reduce the speed somewhat, but as long as you stick to the PCL5e driver, this printer will churn through the most complex of tasks without complaint. And because the 5100A has its own processor (as well as a good dollop of RAM), it doesn't tie up the PC's system memory when pages are prepared for printing.

The great thing about laser printers is their ability to produce crisp and dark text on plain and - most importantly - cheap paper, and in this respect the 5100A didn't disappoint. Characters showed crisp edges with good, dense blacks - as, in fact, you'd expect from a 600dpi laser printer. Business graphics, graphs and tables demonstrated subtle shading and smooth curves too. When it came to photographs, though, the 5100A struggled. Although its output didn't demonstrate the horrible cross-hatched patterning that afflicts so many laser printers, pictures looked just a little too over-exposed. And moving to enhanced 1200x600 resolution didn't seem to make any difference. Strangely, its photographic quality can't match Samsung's excellent ML-85G Plus, which is supposedly the lesser printer.

Overall, though, the ML-5100A is a good all-rounder. It's well-built, quick, able to produce good quality where it matters, and is reasonably cheap to run (Samsung claims 1.3p per page). With an estimated street price of just £169, it's recommended.

Author: - Jonathan Bray