Samsung ML-3561N review

Gallery

Verdict:

The ML-3561N is a fast printer that could bring a welcome dash of style into the office, but it's more expensive to own than competitors such as Kyocera Mita's FS-1920N. With high running costs, it's just too pricy to make an effective workgroup printer.

Review Date: 21 Nov 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Samsung's stylish ML-3561N stands out from our collection of beige, grey and black printers. Its clean lines aren't broken up by too many fussy details and the100-sheet multipurpose tray is disguised by a smooth panel at the front.

Setting up the printer involves dropping in a single consumable and removing a few bits of tape. A small piece of black plastic pinged off our test model during the process. We couldn't find where it came from, but the loss didn't seem to affect the printer's performance.

The Shopper test network uses DHCP to assign IP addresses, but the ML-3561N is set to use static addressing by default. Its control panel network menu is confusing, and we had to refer to the manual before we could enable DHCP. Because this step was necessary before we could install Samsung's software, we had to locate the PDF manual on the product CD. After the printer successfully leased a network address, Samsung's installer found it on our network. The typical installation didn't add a PostScript driver, which is available as a custom option.

The ML-3561N proved to be one of the fastest printers in our text tests and it produced the highest-quality output. Characters had razor-sharp outlines with no traces of spattered toner around the edge and remained very clear down to a tiny two-point font size.

Our mixed-colour test slowed down the ML-3561N considerably. Though the printer's graphical and photo results had excellent shading and detail, they had more light banding than those produced using other printers on test.

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