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Although its footprint isn’t much larger than that of your average small workgroup laser MFP, Samsung’s CLX-6220FX is a lot taller, making it a little awkward to heft into position. As well as being bulky, its also noisy, and it rattles and clatters its way through prints. Theres also a distinct smell of melting toner when it’s operating, all of which makes the CLX-6220FX better suited to being a workgroup device in an office environment than a personal printer.
The CLX-6220FX was brilliantly simple to set up and install. The installer automatically detected the printer on our network and went through the entire process of installing the drivers and software for all the MFP’s features with minimal interaction from us, although it took a while to complete. The MFPs built-in menus are remarkably easy to navigate using its built-in mono LCD display and directional buttons, although the copier shortcut buttons stop working if you’re in, for example, the system settings menu. The control panel also makes it very easy to scan to your network, a PC or a USB stick thats been inserted in the MFPs host USB port.
A sleek HTML interface lets you get an at-a-glance view of the printer’s status and keep track of consumable levels remotely. If you want greater control over it, youll have to log into the SyncThru admin account to view the settings and security menus, which have a wealth of options. These include a range of methods for restricting unauthorised users from printing, and the ability to change everything, from scan defaults to fax and network settings, just as you would using the front panel controls.
The CLX-6220s print quality is particularly good, even among the high standard of colour laser devices. Our colour document prints were extremely accurate and even tiny font sizes were pin-sharp. Shading was also smooth in both dark and light areas. The printer has a best quality mode that prints at an effective resolution of 9,600x600dpi using interpolated resolution enhancement.
This is great for picking out fine detail in line drawings and diagrams, but makes little difference to photo printing. Theres also a glossy colour mode designed to enhance photos. Enabling both resolution enhancement and glossy mode meant that two 10x8in photos took one minute and 24 seconds to print and made little visible difference to their quality, except for slightly warmer skin tones. In contrast, the same task took just 30 seconds at normal quality.
The CLX-6220FXs print speeds are generally excellent. Mono text printed at 17.2ppm and our colour document printed at 17.1ppm, which is almost as fast. A 5-sided colour duplex document printed in one minute and 49 seconds. Print costs are also low, with a mono page cost of 2.2p and a mixed-colour page cost of 11.5.
Samsung’s scanner interface is very basic, only presenting you with a handful of preset options at 300dpi. If you want custom resolution options and other settings, youll have to click on the very thin (and somewhat hard to see) bar at the right-hand side of the preview window. This opens the interface’s extended options and lets you set your own bit-depth and size, and choose from a variety of resolution settings. There are also a wide range of colour correction settings and filters to help you tweak the quality of your scanned images.
The scanner and its interface generally work well, although settings and previews are not retained and the automatic document feeder is slightly prone to paper jams. This only happens if there’s something thick on the flatbed platen below, which causes the ADF to sit at an angle. The CLX-6220FXs scan quality is excellent. We noticed a slight lack of sharpness at resolutions of 150dpi, but higher resolution scans were finely detailed, although some bright colours looked a little muted. Scan speeds are quick too, with a 1,200dpi photo scan completing in just 40 seconds.
Fast colour printing and relatively low colour costs make this MFP an excellent choice for a workgroup that needs quality colour on a regular basis, but although its fairly cheap to run in the long term, its expensive to buy, its bulky and its noisy. Its a great printer, but definitely one for a larger office, making it a Business Buy.
