Product Reviews

Nothing beats a laser printer if you want text in a hurry. While an inkjet must sacrifice text quality to reach its highest-rated speed, we expect lasers to churn out great text as fast as their makers claim. This is certainly the case with the ML-1610, which actually beat Samsung's claim of 16 pages per minute (ppm).

The ML-1610 is a simple printer, designed for use in the home. It's very small and light, so it should fit onto all but the most cluttered of desks. Paper sits in an uncovered tray at the front, and collects in a sensibly-sized 50-page output tray.

Setting up this printer is easy, as it only takes a single cartridge. This is

Samsung's driver software offers all the features we'd expect to see at this price, including a useful option to print a number of pages to one sheet of paper. Unlike some printers, however, it won't guide you through manually printing on both sides of each sheet.

There's little else to criticise. It produced text at 16.1ppm in both of our 50-page document tests, and delivered its greyscale rendition of our 24-page colour document at a solid 14.4ppm. It even printed photos quickly, taking less than 18 seconds to produce two A4 prints.

Mono lasers rarely excel at printing pictures, but we were pleasantly surprised by how well the ML-1610 dealt with graphics, charts and even photos. Our results showed little banding, and the Samsung's accurate use of different levels of grey helped it preserve contrast and detail in the most challenging subjects.

For this price, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better mono laser than the ML-1610. It gets a Recommended award - but lower running costs would have made it a Best Buy.