Samsung ML 4600

This laser printer prints text and graphics well, but needs some improvement in line art printing

Friday, January 11, 2002

This monochrome laser printer from Samsung is targeted at small offices. It’s compact and easy to use, and has a USB interface along with a regular parallel port. For this review, we were not, however, sent a USB cable to connect the printer to our PC. The driver CD has drivers for Windows 9x/NT/2000 and Linux. The printer is also Mac-compatible, though related software wasn’t given on the CD.

The ML 4600 comes with 4 MB RAM that can be upgraded to 68 MB. The drivers are easy to install, and come bundled with Adobe Acrobat Reader 4. The printer has three buttons on its front panel, which can be used to respectively print in toner save or economy mode; fire a demo printout; and to cancel the current print job or reprint the last page printed. The last button can be useful if the printer on your network is located far from your computer, as you needn’t go back to your computer to cancel a print job or ask for a reprint if you aren’t satisfied with the quality. Pressing the button for a few seconds will do the job. The 4 LEDs on the front panel show the print status: whether there’s an error; the printer is out of paper; the printer is printing; and it’s printing in toner save mode, respectively.

The ML 4600 supports all the conventional paper sizes. There’s also a custom size option if the size you want to print in is not available. It can print on bond paper, transparencies, envelopes, labels, and even pre-printed paper. The feeder tray has a capacity of 150 sheets. It supports two printing resolutions of 600 and 300 dpi. It offers a host of printing modes, including a Text enhance and an Image enhance mode. We found that the image became brighter in the enhanced mode, but there was no perceptible difference in Text enhance mode.

Graphics can be sent to the printer either in the Vector or Raster mode. Vector graphic images print faster than Raster ones, but not all images can be printed in this mode. The printer gives the option of printing in Fine, Coarse or Line art modes. This is meant to enhance the quality of images that are printed. The option of Overlaying can be used to create letterheads. You can also place very basic textual watermarks on your documents and even do poster printing.

The ML 4600 printed noiselessly and performed well in our speed tests. It achieved a speed of 7.23 ppm as against its rated 8 ppm, which is good. The quality of printed text was crisp in both 300 and 600 dpi resolutions. The quality of printed graphics, however, wasn’t as impressive. Line art showed breaks in the lines even when we printed in Line art mode, and the fountain fill showed banding at 300 dpi. The print quality of a full page graphics image, however, was good.

With a price tag of Rs19,750, the printer is a good choice for printing text and occasional light graphics.

Ankur Saxena at PCQ Labs

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