HP LaserJet 1000 and Samsung ML-1250 Reviews

Samsung ML-1250

If you think the PR photo below looks familiar, it's because the $249 Samsung ML-1250 looks identical to the $199 ML-1210, with the same 14-inches-square footprint, 14-pound weight, and parallel and USB ports. It uses the same rated-for-2,500-pages toner cartridges, which Samsung sells for $79 (though we found them on the Web for $62) -- and, in the same cost-cutting annoyance, comes with a starter cartridge good for only 1,000 pages, and no printer cable.

Like its sibling's, the Samsung holds up to 150 sheets of paper in a near-vertical bin at the back; pages do a vertical rather than the HP's horizontal U-turn to rest in a 100-sheet output bin, back side toward you (page 1 on top of the stack), against a prop at the front.

The Samsung beats the HP when it comes to handling envelopes, letterhead, or other special stock; not only is there a separate input guide or slot, but flipping down a lever at the front yields a straighter paper path, ejected at the front rather than rear of the printer.

It also boasts a higher duty cycle (up to 12,000 pages per month), as well as buttons to resume a manual-feed job (or print a demo page) and cancel a job in progress. Pressing the latter when the printer's idle, even if you've turned off your PC, reprints the last page of the last job, which is both a handy way to get another copy of a letter and a security concern for the paranoid.

Samsung supplies drivers for Windows 95 and NT, Mac OS 8 or higher, and Red Hat Linux as well as Win 98/Me/2000/XP, but flunks the ease-of-installation test: After installing the driver for our Windows 2000 desktop, we repeatedly tried the instructions on both the setup poster and online PDF documentation for running the Add New Hardware wizard and configuring the USB driver, only to get "Unknown device" and "This folder does not contain a driver for your device" errors. Eventually, we found the ML-1250 in the Printers control panel and manually changed its listed parallel port to USB, which did the trick.

The driver offers similar resolution, watermark, and multiple-pages-per-sheet options to Hewlett-Packard's, with somewhat fewer scaling or print-to-fit options balanced by the ability to print an image or sign as a jumbo poster on overlapping sheets. Perhaps the Samsung's best feature, accessed either via the driver or by simply pressing a front-panel button, is its toner-saver mode, whose output is nearly as dark and crisp as normal text.

Everything we've said on this page, except for dark rather than grayish toner-thrifty printing, applies to the ML-1210 as well as the ML-1250. So what justifies its $50-higher price -- especially since it comes with less buffer memory, 4MB versus 8MB? Well, the ML-1250's memory is expandable (all the way to 68MB), and DOS application fans might appreciate that it offers true PCL6 printer-language compatibility instead of the 1210's strictly host-based/Windows GDI output, which can mean more efficient, quicker printing.

To be honest, however, we didn't notice any difference with our Windows applications -- nor did the Samsung's 12-ppm engine prove substantially faster than the HP's 10-ppm hardware. Our five-page Word document took 38 seconds to the LaserJet's 39, while our 20-pager took 1 minute and 52 seconds, only 11 seconds less than its rival. Text quality was a tossup, or equally excellent from both.

And, efficient PCL6 code notwithstanding, the Samsung took far longer with our 50-page Adobe Acrobat document -- 18 minutes and 19 seconds, with annoying pauses after every two or three pages, although the Samsung's greater memory let it clear the "Printing" dialog box sooner (three and a half minutes). The ML-1250's "1,200-dpi class" setting did yield slightly sharper (if lighter) photo images than the LaserJet's, but it's also slightly noisier in operation.

The Verdict

So which is the winner? Both are capable, compact choices for cranking out top-quality text. The Samsung ML-1250 offers more convenient paper-handling and a superior toner-saver mode; the HP LaserJet 1000 offers easier setup and operation (with a more polished software driver) and is the better value, thanks to its supplied printer cable and full instead of half-empty toner cartridge. But if you already own a parallel or USB cable, we'd vote for the $199 Samsung ML-1210 over either of these $249 models.