Samsung 6050 review

The vast improvement in the quality of inkjets over the past two years has overshadowed the humble laser.

But now, as the hype over photo-quality printing begins to die down, and those in homes and small offices realise how expensive it can be printing in colour, the laser is enjoying a bit of a revival.

Samsung has realised this and unleashed not one, but two lasers in recent months, both targeting the home office and small business. The 6050 is the more fully-featured offering and, while not quite as cheap as its 5100A sibling, is still very reasonably priced at under £300. This much gets you a faster machine, rated at 12ppm as opposed to the 5100A's eight. What's more, when Computer Buyer reviewed the 5100A in June issue, we gave it both a Recommended and Home Office award. So we had high hopes for its stablemate.

Design is orthodox. Whereas the 5100A sported input and output trays that jutted out from the top of the printer, the 6050 stores paper flat in a rather loosely fitting 250-sheet cassette at the bottom. After following a relaxed U-shaped paper path, prints appear face down at the top of the unit. There's a manual feed slot just above the tray, and the whole thing occupies a compact 360x368mm of your precious desk space.

Surprisingly, though, there's little else on paper that separates these two printers. The 6050 is still powered by a 33MHz processor, which is supported by exactly the same amount of RAM as featured in the 5100A. Its resolution is the same again at 600x600dpi - with an enhanced 1,200x600dpi mode for printing graphics.

As with the 5100A, the 6050 gives you the choice of two drivers when printing, which can be confusing. We would, however, recommend sticking to the PCL 5e driver and ignoring PCL XL. When printing complex documents, especially ones including lots of large images, using PCL XL generally proves a bit too much for the modest 4Mb of RAM that's included as standard.

As long as you stick to the more reliable PCL 5e driver, the 6050 will give you very little to grumble about. We printed 15 pages of plain text. The first emerged in just 14 seconds, the rest taking just one minute 12 seconds, to give a print speed of 11.6ppm (pages per minute). This is pretty much what Samsung claims.

Make things a little more complex by adding a few charts and graphs and 6050 slows slightly to 10.4ppm. A really demanding job featuring a raft of different fonts, plus large photographic images, dragged the rate right down to 6.7ppm. Overall, though, the speeds are about what we'd expect from a printer rated at 12ppm. If you upgrade the RAM, you'll should be able to significantly improve the latter two scores.

Quality is more impressive. The Samsung reproduced extremely small lettering flawlessly. What's more, shaded boxes and photographic images were free of banding and cross-hatched patterns - a familiar failing of many lasers. Detail capture with photographs and complex graphics was up to scratch too, with the 6050 managing to capture subtle shades with impressive fidelity.

It's the price that really swings it for the Samsung 6050. Even in this day and age, to pay under £300 for a 12ppm printer - and one as good quality as this - really is quite remarkable. Not everyone needs the extra speed, of course, and for lower intensity environments we'd still recommend the Brother HL-820, but for heavy duty users and small to medium sized offices that do, there's very little to touch the 6050's combination of speed, quality and value.

Author: - Jonathan Bray