Product Reviews

As inkjet standards get higher, laser printer manufacturers know that to make inroads on the sub-£500 printer market they have to produce something special, or at the least very cheap.

The new office inkjet standard was set two months ago when the Epson 900 (reviewed issue 55, p168) graced these pages, hitting speeds of 12ppm and producing superb text and image quality, all for £342. Samsung is clearly taking the challenge seriously, launching a trio of new lasers at aggressive prices, and last month we were impressed enough by its 16ppm 7000N (reviewed issue 56, p166) to give it a Recommended award. As such, we had high hopes for its smaller sibling.

During installation the 6050 gives users a choice of two different languages: PCL5e and PCLXL. Using either of these languages, the 6050 matches the Epson 900 for speed when outputting a plain text 15-page document, sweeping along at 11.8ppm. To put this into perspective, all of Samsung's cheaper laser competitors come in at under 10ppm: for example, 6ppm from the £299 Panasonic KX-P6500 (reviewed issue 49, p135) and 9.5ppm from the £309 Brother HL-1050 (reviewed issue 49, p163). Tougher competition comes from the 12ppm Xerox DocuPrint P12 (reviewed issue 52, p174), but this has a more expensive list price of £499.

The choice of PCL5e or PCLXL became more important when testing the 6050 with our graphics-heavy 24-page document. When using PCL5e it managed a respectable 7.5ppm, but in PCLXL mode it failed the test entirely, stumbling one-fifth of the way through and then stopping due to a lack of memory. Even installing an extra 16Mb 72-pin SIMM into the 6050's spare memory slot couldn't persuade the printer to produce a significantly better performance. It did at least complete the test, but it did so at an unimpressive rate of 2.3ppm. The good news is that our less complex business document caused no such problems, so if your graphical expectations extend no further than charts and graphs, you can expect rates of close to 12ppm using PCL5e and 10ppm from PCLXL.

Speed, of course, isn't everything, so I was relieved to see that print quality hadn't been compromised for the sake of an extra couple of pages per minute. In fact, the 6050 produced the best quality print

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we've seen at this price point. Thanks to a 600 x 600dpi resolution and Samsung's excellent print engine, fonts were reproduced flawlessly even at 2pt, and shaded boxes were printed near perfectly with only hints of banding. This is true for both languages, so for general documents there's no reason to opt for the slower PCLXL.

The more advanced language is useful when reproducing complicated graphics and photographs, as it provides a well-balanced tone and doesn't share PCL5e's tendencies towards over exposure. It does lose a little detail in dark areas, though, and most images are darker than we'd like, but these criticisms pale into insignificance against the amount of banding evident in the output of printers such as the Panasonic KX-6500 and Brother HL-1050. In terms of fine detail, the 6050 produces even better images than the Xerox DocuPrint P12, which uses the much-praised Adobe PrintGear language.

The chip behind the 6050's performance is a 33MHz RISC processor, which is coupled with 4Mb of memory as standard. Memory is upgradable to a maximum of 36Mb using a standard 72-pin SIMM. There's no way of installing a network card, but you can still use the 6050 as a workgroup printer by connecting it to one PC on a network and selecting it as a shared resource. Samsung claims a 15,000 monthly duty cycle, so it should be able to cope easily with these sorts of demands.

The 6050 doesn't look like a workhorse, but the design is functional and the small footprint will be well appreciated where desk or office space is at a premium. The fascia is simple, sporting just a single button and four LEDs to let you know if the printer is on, out of paper, in manual mode or suffering from an error such as a paper jam. The 250-sheet paper tray fits only loosely into the printer, but in practice this shouldn't cause too much of a problem; unless you're intending to print on a slope, that is. Samsung also offers an extra paper cassette for £99, which holds another 250 sheets and fits underneath the main body of the printer.

If you're intending to put the 6050 to heavy use, running costs become more important. According to Samsung each toner cartridge lasts for 5,000 pages at five per cent coverage. With replacement cartridges costing £65 this works out at a reasonable 1.3p per page. The Xerox DocuPrint P12, by comparison, manages 1.2p per page but, considering how much more expensive it is, you'd have to print an awful lot of pages to break even.

The only real chinks in the 6050's armour are its lack of networking features and failure to cope with complex graphical tasks using PCLXL. However, as long as you stick to using PCL5e you shouldn't have any reason for complaint. It's quality and speed combined with a very reasonable £329 price tag makes it ideal for high-volume personal or small office use.