Samsung ML-1740 Review

It's About Work, Not About Art

Setup is as simple as taking the printer out of the box, removing the inevitable few pieces of tape, and flipping down the front panel for five seconds to slide in the toner cartridge. The various plastic doors and drawers feel a little on the light side, not enough to be called flimsy but enough to make you take a bit of care in opening and closing. The ML-1740 weighs 18 pounds overall.

The supplied cartridge, unfortunately, earns the usual jeers for being a skimpy, 1,000-page starter unit; replacement cartridges are rated for 3,000 pages and priced around $80, which divides out to something like 2.7 cents per page -- higher than bigger, heavy-duty laser printers, but much more economical than personal inkjets.

Along with a detailed manual in Adobe Acrobat PDF format, the provided software CD installs a status monitor with pop-up help messages and a driver with a fair variety of N-up, booklet, and watermark printing options. While you can work around it with print-odd-or-even-page functions, however, we wish the driver had an option to guide users through manual duplexing or two-sided printing as most of Samsung's rivals do.

Reasonably quiet, apart from some whirring and clicking, the ML-1740 warms up in perhaps half a minute (Samsung says the printer shifts from an average of 330 watts while working to 10 watts in sleep mode), then produces the first page of a print job in a prompt 12 seconds -- the time it took to print our one-page Word business letter with company-logo letterhead.

Longer jobs are similarly quick, with six full-page, white-background PowerPoint slides printing in 35 seconds (but six dark-background slides taking 44 seconds). Our 55-page Acrobat manual appeared in 3 minutes and 42 seconds, although that task brought out the worst in the Samsung's economy-model, host-based (Windows GDI rather than PCL or PostScript) design, not to mention our slow old Pentium III desktop: It took a minute and 40 seconds for Acrobat's "Printing" dialog box to plod through the pages and disappear from the screen.

Text quality earns a B+, with smooth and sharp letters even in small font sizes; text at the default setting was a tiny bit lighter or less richly black than we like, but unmistakably laser quality and suited for any business correspondence.

As you might guess, graphics output isn't the ML-1740's strong suit: Charts and graphs are fine by monochrome laser standards, but show some banding, and digital-camera images, though fast -- our 8 by 10's averaged just 20 seconds -- are somewhat dark and grainy as well as banded, more reminiscent of your morning newspaper than an inkjet or color laser.

But again, we're talking not just about a monochrome laser printer but about a $150 one: The ML-1740 is an easy-to-buy, easy-to-use, easy-to-like little laser that's a first-class choice for a home office or small business that needs to put out a medium-high amount of text on a tight budget. That's pretty much the same thing we'd have said about the ML-1710 a year ago, but the budget's gotten 25 percent tighter. That's impressive.

Pros:

• A real laser printer, with real paper drawer, real simple design, and real text quality, for a really low price

Cons:

• Not the best graphics quality; not expandable; host-based architecture makes slow PCs slower

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