Scanner and copier

The scanner quality is good and colours are fairly accurate. Digitalisation could be sharper and faster: 14 seconds for preview, 14 seconds to scan a 10x15 photo at 300 dpi; other models are twice as fast but how important is this?

A black and white copy also takes about 14 seconds.

Samsung has come up with the goods again and is posing problems for the competition with this model. A nice-looking compact multifunction laser (33 x 39 x 16 cm) at the price of an ink jet. Oh, and it’s also a wi-fi model.

Build and design

There are a few avantages to a laser machine: they are twice as fast as an inkjets (about 15 pages a minute) and printing costs are much lower. The SCX-4500W is delivered with toner guaranteeing 2000 pages, whereas ink jets come with consumables for 400 pages at best.

An all-in-one laser however does not only have advantages. The biggest fault is the loss of colour. And a black and white webpage is straight away less legible. We also discovered another fault with this model: installing the wi-fi is a real nightmare. It’s simple: if you don’t want to succeed, just follow the incomprehensible manual. We resorted to instinct! Request the printer’s network configuration using the buttons on top, locate its IP, connect via the internet browser of a computer and organise the wi-fi activation settings. Simple, no? Why doesn’t it say this in the manual?

Print quality

Very good; better than many budget laser printers. You’ll have to settle for black and white though. At least the pages are nice with good greys and precise contours…

Our rating may seem severe but it's due to the absence of colour. We can’t mark it much higher when other printers do both black and white (just as well at times) and colour, though often imperfect. We like to be able to choose rather than to be limited from the start.

Speeds

This is a personal laser printer. This means that it hasn’t been designed to handle 10 pieces of work from ten different users simultaneously. It’s paper holder is proof of this: it only holds 100 sheets rather than the usual 250. Nor is there an automatic double-sided mode. Speeds are on the low side for a laser printer: 16 pages a minute.

Another limitation is that the first page takes a long time (this limits it in terms of use on a reception desk for example). If you leave it in idle for a while and launch a piece of work, you’ll have to wait 18 seconds between sending the document and waiting for it to print. Not very responsive then, but fairly quiet. Have a look at our video: