Samsung ML-1630W wireless network mono laser printer

oooooh shiny

i like it a lot

i'm trying to find a reason for needing a mono laser printer instead of a colour inkjet, and i can't yet

but when i do, i think i'll be getting this one

@ Limited printing

I've always found it fiddling to feed envelopes into any printer. Easier to use window envelopes, or a dedicated label printer.

agreed on the wifi setup

I got a Samsung CLP310 color laser a few months ago - US$196, incl tax and free shipping - rather nice-looking compact black unit, fairly light for a color laser @ 27 lbs., fairly quiet, too.

Have to agree with the rather painful wifi setup. The 'easy' setup didn't work, due to the printer being assigned a strange default IP address - a 191. iirc rather than the standard 192. that most home networks use.

Had to use a crossover ether cable (fortunately, supplied) to connect it directly to my PC, then use a little program on the install CD to manually assign a new address. Then I could at least see the printer.

However, the web-based interface refused to correctly load the Settings page to set up the wifi info (WPA passkey, etc.), returning an error message, using IE6 on w2k; using IE6 on XP did the trick. Still not sure why that should make a difference, unless it's some .NET thing.

Once set up, it works a charm.

B&W printing quality is, as on your reviewed model, lovely. Color is ... meh (and pokey, @ 4ppm) but, hey, it *is* color.

CLP-510, Ubuntu

I've got a CLP-510. Unlike the CLP-310, it's a bit of a boatanchor (check out online photos, it's like twice as big and probably 10x as big as the ML-1630W). But, I got it for like $250, color, duplex, works well for me. Don't know about the ML-1630W, but the CLP-510 uses a Xerox print engine. Ubuntu has a driver for it, when I used it about a year ago the color was a little off (I think that's fixed now). Samsung *also* has a binary-blob Linux driver for their printers, which hooked into cups nicely so it just shows as another choice of printer model (my recollection is the Ubuntu-supplied stuff was listed under "Samsung" and the company-supplied were under "SAMSUNG" 8-)

Since I'm on an Ubuntu box I looked, ML-1630 is listed. 1630W isn't, but it appears that's just the 1630 with wireless. JBR, I think you're in good shape!

2 to 3p a sheet?

Ouch. Even our all-in-one ink jet does better than that, albeit using non-Canon cartridges. Bet it's better at photo-printing too. Sure, it'll be slower, but you don't buy a laser like this one for high volume printing where speed really matters.