Samsung ML-1665 Laser Printer Review

by Michael

If you are a small office / home office (SOHO) with lots of printing to do, a laser printer is usually the way to go, saving you on spending too much on ink and toners. A laser printer is, however, relatively bulky compared to an inkjet printer. But now Samsung has introduced a new generation of small laser printers.

The Samsung ML-1665 is the smallest monochrome laser printer presently on the market that will easily fit in on any desk.

Although it is small and light, the Samsung ML-1665 performs almost as good as the more expensive and bigger laser printers. Here is our review of the Samsung ML-1665 monochrome laser printer.

Samsung ML-1665 Laser Printer Review

At first sight, the Samsung ML-1665 looks like any other laser printer, except smaller. But under the hood, it incorporates a wide range of features that make printing simple and convenient for the SOHO.

Intuitive Printing with ‘One-Touch’ Feature

The ‘One-Touch’ feature enables you to quickly and easily do a screen print: exactly what you see on your PC screen is dumped onto the printer at the touch of a button. This means all you have to do is to ensure you have the right image on the screen and is great for printing images that fills up the whole screen.

Of course, screen print will also print your browser or software menu and toolbar, so it’s not for every situation.

AnyWeb Print Feature

The “AnyWeb Print” feature allows you to select portions of images that you want to print and drop that onto a blank page. Once you have the page the way you want, you can go ahead with the printing. This gives you the freedom to print only the portions of an image, thus saving on toners and paper.

To take advantage of this feature, you need to download a sotware from Samsung’s website. Installing the software places a button on your browser’s toolbar and you simply click on it to start selecting the area you want to print. You have a choice to save your resulting image as a TIFF image, in PDF format or to start printing immediately.

Note that the software installs and works fine in Internet Explorer but we could not get it to work properly in Firefox.

Printing Speed

Ready mode prints quite fast, about 16 – 18 pages per minute.

In Off mode, it take about 18 seconds for the first print to come out. But once it gets going, a page prints in about 6 – 9 seconds.

It is relatively quiet when it is printing.

Print Quality

Contrary to inkjet printers, there are no different quality modes to choose from. The print resolution for the Samsung ML-1665 laser printer is 1200 x 600 dpi.

Since this is a monochrome printer (and not designed to reproduce photographs), that resolution is amply enough for document printing.

Our tests show that the quality is good, and the resolution and sharpness are acceptable. There is no smearing or unevenness.

Letters printed on the Samsung ML-1665 look as good as those from more expensive laser printers.

Energy Consumption

The Samsung ML-1665 consumes about half the power (270 W) of most other regular laser printers (400 – 750 W).

In Ready mode, the power consumption is 40 W and in Power Save mode, it is 2.8 W (compared to 9.6 W for other printers).

The Power button is on the front panel, which makes it very convenient to reach. Too many printers have their ON/OFF button at the rear which, depending on where you’ve found space on your desk to stash the printer, can make it very difficult to reach at sometimes.

In the Power Off mode, the Samsung ML-1665 still consumes some energy, about 0.45 W, which is not much.

Cost

The best part of the Samsung ML-1665 laser printer is its very affordable price at about $100. However, street price and promotions bring this price right down: you can purchase it for about $49 at Amazon.com when it is on promotion.

The catch, as always with p[rinters, is that toner cartridge (MLT-D1042S) replacement costs as much as the printer. A new toner can print about 1,500 pages before it needs to be replaced. The cost per page amounts to about 5 to 6 cents.