Computer Hardware Blog

Sub-£100 laser printers are nothing new, but for that money you’d expect a fairly basic personal laser. Samsung’s ML-3050 certainly covers the basics, but also offers a couple of extras you might not expect.

At first sight the ML-3050 is nothing special: a squashed cube in two tones of grey with a 250-sheet paper tray sliding out from the bottom and a multi-purpose tray folding down from the front panel. This isn’t a single-sheet tray, though, and can take up to 100 sheets of special media, such as letterheads or envelopes. Pages end up in an output tray set into the top of the machine.

Also at the top is the control panel, though there’s no LCD display here, just three buttons: one stops a print job, the second switches on toner saving and the last, a bit of a sales indulgence, prints a demo page. At the back are both USB 2 and parallel ports, again unusual in an entry-level printer but useful if all your USB ports are in use.

The printer is supplied with a low capacity toner cartridge which is capable of producing 4,000 pages at 5% coverage, to reduce print costs to around 1.7p per page it would be necessary to replace this cartridge when empty with the high capacity 8,000 page ML-D3050b cartridge.

As this cartridge can cost almost as much as the printer it is essential to shop around for the best value, try comparing prices from Samsung with local retailers and an online discounter like Cartcon.

The ML-3050 is a quick machine for the money and we saw 16ppm for text and just over 4ppm for photographic prints. While neither of these speeds comes close to Samsung’s rating of 28ppm, real-world measurements rarely do. The text print speed in particular is very reasonable for a printer in this price range.

The printer has a resolution of 1,200dpi, but this is an enhanced figure and the native resolution is half this. Even so, it gave better reproduction of our test photo at 600dpi than with the 1,200dpi enhancement turned on. In both modes it did well for a mono laser and text print was particularly crisp and precise.

In conclusion the ML-3050 is a great little laser printer, giving quality print at low price. It’s easy to set up and use and is quick enough for most personal print applications. Samsung needs to look at the pricing of its print cartridges, though, if its customers aren’t to buy new printers each time they need more toner.

Alan Wilson has over 10 years experience in the imaging industry and is a director of Cartridge Concept.

The Lexmark X4550 isn’t the cheapest printing device to offer Wi-Fi capabilities (that accolade goes to the juicily priced £60 Lexmark Z1420 inkjet), but it still weighs in at a sub-£80 price that, particularly in light of its scanning capabilities, ought to grab your attention.

Manufacturers are always searching for the next big feature or trend that looks like sweeping across the industry. In the case of printer and multi-function device manufacturer Lexmark, it reckons wireless connections look set to saturate homes and offices across the nation.

Cartridges supplied with the machine are the #23 black and the #24 colour cartridge, these are low capacity cartridges and should be replaced with high yield cartridges #34 and #35 when they run out. This should improve the running costs to about 5.8 pence per page.

These cartridges have been used in previous Lexmark models and along with the optional photo cartridge #31 are readily available from Lexmark, many high street retailers or from an online discounter like Cartcon.

Wi-Fi aside, the Lexmark X4550 is a solid if slightly uninspirational All-In-One multifunction device.

The Lexmark X4550’s maximum printer resolution of 4,800×1,200 is typical of sub-£100 All-In-Ones, although even at its highest quality mode, it never achieves some of the same heights of excellence as some models costing considerably less.

We were never able to get pin-sharp text out of the Lexmark X4550, and even at the highest level, the characters are slightly poorly formed. Performance was reasonably good though, with the middle quality mode running out at a handsome 8.6ppm (pages per minute). On graphics, the Lexmark quickly dropped to sluggish performance levels once past the (actually quite decent) fastest mode. Quality was acceptable, but we weren’t totally enthused by the results.

Setting up Wi-Fi with the Lexmark X4550 is very simple, thanks to the comprehensive (but still reasonably swift) installation routine. The Lexmark even has coloured lights to tell you whether it’s connected and, if not, whether there’s a convenient network within range. In fact, setting up the Lexmark X4550 is, overall, a breeze.

The Lexmark X4550 also works adequately as a scanner, offering very solid (if, again, not stunning) results.

Notebook users shouldn’t underestimate the ease of being able to print from anywhere in the house without the hassle of wires. Running off a couple of prints from the sofa is remarkably liberating, and we can only hope other manufacturers follow suit in due course. Lexmark’s X4550 is not meant to be everything to everybody, but it deserves much credit for providing wireless at such a cheap price.

Alan Wilson has over 10 years experience in the imaging industry and is currently a director of Cartridge Concept.

For a network-enabled multifunction printer, the HP Photosmart C5180 All-In-One is currently available for under £100, which makes it a very interesting propos ion.

The printer uses six individual ink cartridges, HP363 which includes a light cyan and light magenta in addition to the primary three colours. The standard black cartridge contains 6ml of ink whilst the colour cartridges contain only 4ml. It is better value to buy the value pack (HPQ7966ee), which contains one of each cartridge rather than buying them individually, and if you intend to print mainly text then the large capacity black cartridge (HPC8719ee) which contains 17ml of ink is recommended.

As these cartridges are of a small volume it makes little sense to buy anything other than HP original cartridges, as the savings would be minimal, however shopping around should yield some attractive pricing.

These cartridges have been used in other printers and are now readily available, try comparing prices from HP direct with your local retailer and an online discounter like Cartcon.

The HP Photosmart C5180 has a USB port in addition to built-in ethernet, but unlike many other similarly priced multifunction devices, it doesn’t have a PictBridge port. To print photos from your digital camera without using a PC, you can use one of the HP Photosmart C5180’s four media slots, which between them accept all the major memory card formats.

The 2.4in colour LCD displays images from your card and lets you see the effects of various enhancements, including red-eye removal, cropping, and the use of frames. HP has divided the HP Photosmart C5180’s control panel sensibly by function, placing the buttons for navigating menus and browsing images in front of the LCD.

The HP Photosmart C5180’s main paper tray holds up to 100 sheets of plain paper. A second tray can hold 30 sheets of 4-by-6-inch photo paper. You slide it into place only when printing snapshots, and you can see whether it’s in use through a clear window in the output tray. The flatbed scanner handles documents up to letter-size, but it lacks an automatic document feeder to handle larger sizes or multiple pages.

Film scanning capabilities are nonexistent on the HP Photosmart C5180; however, you do get HP’s excellent Photosmart Premier software, which requires a lengthy installation and takes up a hefty chunk of disk space.

Photos printed by the HP Photosmart C5180 on HP’s Advanced Photo Paper exhibited vibrant colours, sharp detail, and smooth tonal gradations, though some shadows looked bluish and skin tones appeared slightly unnatural. Scanning quality and copying quality were good, but not stellar, across our variety of tests. However in photos printed on plain paper, colours looked dull and shadow detail was sparse.

Text and graphics pages printed at roughly average speeds of 7.3 pages per minute and 2.8 ppm, respectively. Our 5×7in test photo printed in 45 seconds - close to the test-group average. Scans completed quickly, with our 4-by-5-inch test photo at 100 dpi taking just 7.1 seconds (only the Canon MP960 was faster, at 6.2 seconds). On the other hand, plain-paper copying averaged a slower-than-normal 2.1ppm.

The well-priced HP Photosmart C5180 has much to offer for printing photos and for sharing on a small network. It delivers high-quality glossy photos, but its plain-paper photo prints are not great.

Alan Wilson has been employed in the imaging business for over 10 years and is currently a director of Cartridge Concept.