Samsung ML 4600

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