Samsung ML-1640

no-brainer

I find this term disrespectful and exclusionary.

What next ?? Genocide of the 'Brains'

basic information?

Could we get some more information along reviews? Like, how much memory does this POC come with? I recently replaced a low brow IBM/Lexmark Laser with a cheapish Brother without paying much attention to this as it was intended to work in a low-volume home-network. What I did not expect was that the Brother apparently came with so little memory (in 2009!) that it will take several minutes for more complicated jobs (especially grafic-heavy PDFs of course, but using a nonstandard font with some applied effects will make it choke too, even if it's just a single page PDF <100kB). In fact it takes so long for some stuff to get printed one could think the thing was broken.

I would like to see a review exploring printers that are decidedly NOT in the disposable class and come with plenty memory and pre-equipped with a decent load of toner.

I remember when...

Laser printers were $5000! Where's my "get off my lawn" and "I'm an old man!" icons?

Seriously though, without a decent paper tray and Postscript, it's just junk. I have a Brother HL-5240 with both for only US$120. It's worth the extra wodge to do w/o CUPS or lpd.

Postscript means "no farking around with drivers for me, thank you very much!" except maybe a PPD for GIMP, but you can get by w/o one. And without drivers, you can even get rid of lpd and print directly to the device.

And why does reghardware have a "back to the article" link, and the regular site doesn't?

Price?

Verdict says under "£50". Price reads "£69". Please tell us which one is correct!

Worth mentioning

...that the predecessor of this printer, the ML-1610, does have a cover for the paper tray, and it's almost identical in specification. And it's cheaper. And I can vouch for it being bloody good for the price I paid.

All I need know is a time machine

Then I would buy loads of these and go back to 1994 to sell them for a £1000 each.

@Matt Smart

I second that (also I didn't realise the 1st toner was a starter, so I was v.pleased to find out that the refurbished(seems identical to the original) from the cartridge I got for £20 would print over 2x as many sheets)

Works 100% on Debian testing as well (didn't rate the Samsung driver installer - didn't bother with it in the end as it worked out of the box anyway)

@Neur0mancer

So just to clarify, if you had possession of a time machine, a machine that has the ability to to transport you (+ cargo of Samsung printers) through the fourth dimension, you would then use this technological marvel in order to..... sell printers?!

no brains

Is it a no-brainer? I suppose it is if by that you mean the sort of purchase that someone with no brain might make. TCO is key when buying any printer. £38 for for a 1500 page toner cartridge, is pretty extortionate.

Also WTF is going on with your PPM calculations. The time it takes to warm up and print the first page, this doesn't count towards the sustained PPM count, the article said:

"Our five-page text print took 30 seconds, so a straight 10ppm, but when we increased the run to 20 pages, it completed in 1:24, a speed of 14.3ppm. This isn’t far off the spec"

14.3 pages per minute, isn't the maximum measured speed, it is the average speed. If it took 30 seconds for 5 pages and 84 seconds for 20 pages, it seems a reasonable guess that the last 15 pages of the 20 page run took 54 seconds - that works out at 3.6 seconds per page or 16.6 pages per minute.

Also ideal for...

making my own pcbs' and printing on acetate.

Power consumption

Without the standby electricity use (most printers are idle most of the time), this does not give the give the total cost of ownership. Samsung does not see fit to list power consumption on its web site, but it is in the user guide and is quoted as follows:

Average operating mode: Less than 300 W

Ready mode: Less than 70 W

Sleep mode: Less than 6W

Power off mode: 0W

If this is right (and a journalist should surely check?), it is on 24*7, and it powers down from Operating to Ready in a few seconds and from Ready to Sleep in a few minutes, then this printer will cost about £6 a year to run in the UK. This is typical for a modern low volume laser printer, and although much lower than typical printers of two or three years ago, it still adds significantly to the TCO.

@ Power Consumption

Good grief Chris, no we don't add up all power consumption of everything into the TCO because you can TURN IT OFF any, and I mean ANY time you like.

It's pointless to mention the power consumption when for it's class it is among the least power hungry. I suppose we'd all go back to using mechanical typewriters because it's less power consumption?

What uses more power is surfing the internet to inject comments about power consumption. Net power loss in pausing to consider it.