Samsung SCX-4100 Review Chapel Hill NC

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Originally published at Internet.com

One Page at a Time

Samsung calls its SCX-4100 a "Digital Productivity Center," probably because "Monochrome Productivity Center" wouldn't sound as sexy. But black-and-white laser printers are still smart choices for high-volume handling of business correspondence and other documents, and the vast majority of office copiers are monochrome.

So combining a workhorse laser with a copier and scanner makes desk-space-saving sense -- especially with a low price of $199 plus lower costs per page than today's ubiquitous color inkjet printer/scanner/copiers. Unfortunately, though we won't knock the SCX-4100 for lacking color printouts, we'll knock it for lacking one or two other things.

Pennies Per Page

Though a bit slower than the latest personal lasers -- it's rated at 15 pages per minute with 600 by 600 dpi resolution, versus 17 ppm for Samsung's ML-1740 -- the 21-pound SCX-4100 shows the company's skill at building compact printers: It stands just over 9 inches tall with a footprint of 16 by 17 inches, though you'll want to allow some extra space behind for the swing-up door that gives a straight-through paper path for the single-sheet or -envelope feeding slot above the main paper drawer.

The latter pulls out from the bottom front just like a big printer or copier's, though not as deep -- it holds 250 letter- or legal-sized sheets. Unless you've opened the rear door, pages perform a backflip to exit face down in a shallow 50-sheet output tray or cubbyhole beneath the flatbed scanner.

Samsung says the printer can accommodate two users -- Windows or Linux PCs (but no Macs) plugged into its parallel and USB ports -- but it doesn't come with parallel or USB cables, a network adapter, or a way to expand its onboard memory past the provided 8MB.

Aside from loading paper, the only other setup chore is flipping down the front panel to insert the combination toner cartridge and drum, which takes about 10 seconds. Each replacement cartridge costs $80 and is good for roughly 3,000 pages, which divides out to a frugal 2.7 cents per page -- but Samsung continues to earn our boos and hisses for packaging a measly 1,000-page "starter" cartridge in the box.

The one-piece toner and drum design makes maintenance simple. Most small offices will never approach the Samsung's rated duty cycle of 10,000 pages per month, so it'll take some time to reach the 60,000-page mark at which the company suggests taking the SCX-4100 to the shop for paper-feeding and transfer roller and fuser-unit replacement -- a tune-up likely to cost enough to make you opt for buying a whole new $199 unit instead.

A control panel at the front right edge of the unit offers a hard-to-read (nonbacklit) two-line LCD and a handful of buttons for moving through menus and adjusting the number and darkness of copies when using the Samsung as a walk-up copier; several times we thought we'd pressed the copy start/Enter button only to find that it hadn't registered, so were obliged to give it a hard

What's Missing?

Switched on, the SCX-4100 warms up in 40-odd seconds. After that, it comes close to its advertised first-page-out time of 12 seconds -- our one-page Microsoft Word business letter appeared in 14 seconds at the default 600 dpi resolution. (You can use the software driver to specify 300 dpi, which gained a few seconds' speed in our tests but makes graphics look like dotty newspaper photos.)

Delivering, well, laser-quality text, the Samsung purred through a 20-page Word document in 1 minute and 38 seconds and 55-page Acrobat file in just over four minutes. Graphics suffered from a bit of banding in solid-color areas or photo images (an 8 by 10-inch print took 30 seconds), but no more so than with other monochrome lasers we've tried. As a copier, the SCX-4100 produced five copies of a test page in 28 seconds; the copies were very clear, though a bit dark at the default setting.

Lifting the rear-hinged lid reveals the 8.5 by 11.7-inch glass of the flatbed scanner, which offers 600 by 600 dpi optical resolution with up to 4,800 dpi enhanced or interpolated resolution. Though its printouts are strictly black and white, the SCX-4100's scanner can produce 24-bit color as well as grayscale images, with clear edges and crisp colors in our tests. The lid feels a little flimsy, but can elevate by half an inch or so to accommodate a magazine, if not a thick book.

In copier mode, the Samsung offers 50- to 200-percent zoom for up to 99 copies, as well as the ability to resize or clone a small original to fill the page. One handy feature prints the front and back sides of an item (say, a driver's license) on the top and bottom halves of one sheet.

Paper-Shuffling

Along with a driver offering the usual array of N-up, poster, and watermark printing options, Samsung's software CD installs a SmarThru utility that provides a handy control menu for performing plain or fancy copying and for sending scans as e-mail attachments, posting them to a Web-server album, or running them through the supplied ReadIris OCR program. There's also a simple editor for cropping, rotating, and adjusting the color or brightness of scanned images.

The software is adequate, but not especially intuitive (should you click the "Scan" tab at the top or "Scan" button at the bottom?) or powerful compared to stronger document managers such as the Lexmark X7170's. Notably, it can't save scans as Adobe Acrobat PDF files.

But that's not the significant omission we hinted at earlier. Our big gripe is that a monochrome laser-based multifunction device seems naturally more aimed at an office environment than a consumer-friendly color inkjet model might be ... so it's hard to say why Samsung didn't outfit the SCX-4100 with faxing as well as printing, scanning, and copying capabilities, and even harder to say why there's no automatic document feeder (ADF) to save you the chore of manually copying or scanning one page at a time.

Without a feeder, the copier's instantly demoted from primary workhorse to occasional convenience, making duplicates of just a page or two now and then. Nor is the SCX-4100's low price a complete excuse, since plenty of inkjet-based all-in-ones -- and some monochrome-laser rivals, such as Brother's DCP-7020 and MFC-7220 -- fit an ADF into a $200 budget.

We've praised Samsung's entry-level laser printers, and the SCX-4100 is a competent desktop printer with bonus scanning and copying capacity. But it's not at the head of its class.

Pros: * A compact, quiet monochrome laser printer that's also a copier and flatbed color scanner * Good printing performance; simple maintenance

Cons: * Why no automatic document feeder or fax functionality? * Skimpy starter toner cartridge; unexceptional scanning software