Samsung ML-1520 review

At its suggested retail price of £99 this new mono laser from Samsung is up against stiff competition, such as Konica Minolta's PagePro 1300W.

The £83 PagePro has a clear specification advantage, with a 1,200dpi resolution and slightly higher 16 pages per minute (ppm) print speed.

However, we've seen heavy discounting on Samsung lasers before and the ML-1520 looks as if it will continue this trend. At the time Shopper went to press, PC World was offering the printer online for just £40 including VAT. That's less than the price of most replacement toners.

The ML-1520 looks very trim from most angles, but the printer's base projects from its rear. It's still small and low, but can't be pushed as far back as you'd expect. The output tray is shorter than a piece of A4 paper, and we wonder why Samsung hasn't extended it to the same depth as the base.

Printed pages are instead retained by a fold-up guide. On our review sample this had some poorly finished moulding marks that snagged the leading edge of paper, causing chaos in the output tray until we smoothed them off.

During our testing an occasional blank sheet of paper crept into the printer's output. In our tests it managed 13ppm on both our mono documents. It dealt superbly with our complex, 24-page mixed colour test, slowing only marginally to 12.5ppm.

Even with the Toner Save feature disabled and the Dark setting selected, prints from the ML-1520 seemed to have an economical covering of toner and black text could have been darker. Otherwise its print quality was very good for a budget device, and photographs were exceptional.

The ML-1520 is a competent mono laser, but it isn't good enough to stand out at its suggested retail price of £99. Priced more competitively it makes a great budget printer, and PC World's current price it's simply a steal.