Samsung SCX-4200 review

If you don't need to make colour prints or copies, a good mono laser multifunction peripheral can prove quicker and cheaper to run than an inkjet.

At £115 including VAT, Samsung's SCX-4200 is little more expensive to buy than a mid-range inkjet MFP. It can scan at 600dpi in colour, and print or copy in black and white.

The SCX-4200 is little bigger than the mono laser printers reviewed in this month's Labs test on page 102. It has a 250-sheet enclosed paper tray, with a single-page multipurpose slot above it. It's easy to feed paper, but envelopes are crumpled by the time they emerge.

Printed paper is deposited in a shallow output tray just beneath the scanner bed. There's room here for short documents, but for longer print jobs the entire scanner can pivot up by a few degrees to provide more room. When releasing the catch that holds it in place, you need to be careful not to trap your fingers. This unusual arrangement helps keep the SCX-4200 very compact, but we wonder whether it's worth it just to shave off a couple of inches from its height.

In other respects, the SCX-4200 is very easy to live with. It takes a single consumable, combining the printer's imaging drum and toner. The printer arrives with a 1,000-page starter cartridge. Replacements last for 3,000 pages and cost around £50, giving this multifunction peripheral a lower cost per page than most of the mono laser printers in this month's Labs test.

Samsung provides a set of simple software that is extremely user-friendly. Using the Smar-Thru software you can control most of the device's functions from your computer. The TWAIN interface seems too basic until you open its concealed sidebar, which reveals more advanced functions. It's one of the best such interfaces we've used. Scans were acceptably quick, and produced sharp images with faithful colours.

Although the SCX-4200 isn't a particularly fast printer, it managed respectable results across our timed tests, peaking at 16.6ppm when printing 50 copies of our mono letter. It printed high-quality black text, with sharp and reasonably smooth outlines. Shading in graphics and photographs was also very good, although the dots used to create grey shades were quite visible.

The SCX-4200 produced dark copies in which some shade details were lost from graphics. Its performance was otherwise very good, and its reasonable running costs make it great value overall.