Samsung SCX-4100

At this price, the Samsung SCX-4100 is barely more expensive than some personal mono lasers, and you're also getting flatbed scanning and copying facilities.

Samsung claims a print speed of 16ppm, but that proved slightly optimistic in our tests. Printing a 50-page plain text document from cold took just under four minutes - not quite 15 pages per minute. It's still speedy enough though, and we found adding 50 colour letterheads barely slowed things down. Expect a warm-up time of around 12 seconds, plus a further 15 seconds for the first page to appear.

Our complex Excel test lengthened the first page time to 17 seconds. The full workbook appeared after one minute, 24 seconds - still acceptable at 10.7ppm. 24 pages of graphics-intensive DTP caused a 22-second delay, before emerging at just less than 11ppm. Despite the SCX-4100's minimal 8MB of RAM, sending five copies of a 5MB PDF didn't overly phase it, with the first page appearing after 19 seconds, and the remainder at just over 10ppm. The driver also allows collation, making multiple runs of the same document much easier.

In terms of quality, the SCX-4100's pin-sharp black text doesn't come as any surprise, but the quality of white (unprinted) text on black shows impressive precision. Solid areas of black don't appear saturated either, although dithering is evident on areas of grey. Our Excel graphs and spreadsheets showed an excellent level of contrast, smooth diagonals and pleasing detail, and even photographs were reproduced with surprising evenness. Slight banding was evident in areas, but it's still an excellent performance for a machine of this price.

Scanning is less remarkable, however. With an A4 preview taking 25 seconds at 300dpi, and a minute-and-a-half for the full scan, it's not suited to regular document archival. 150dpi scans will complete in 30 seconds, but we found any text under 8-point unreadable. There was also a significant amount of colour interference on our test document, further reducing the clarity. Photographic scans suffered from less obvious flaws, but mediocre detail resolution and colour accuracy mean we can't recommend the scanner for sourcing reprints.

These problems are passed on to copying, although the contrast remains good. It's not especially quick - a single copy will take around 27 seconds if it needs to warm up, with a further five copies appearing in another 30 seconds.

Samsung deserves praise for the unit's design though. It claims the SCX-4100 has the smallest footprint in its class, and at just 422 x 400 x 239mm (WDH), it couldn't be much smaller. There aren't any clumsy fold-out paper trays either, with prints emerging in a cleverly recessed area under the flatbed. It gets full after around 60 pages, but you can tilt the upper section up by an inch for larger jobs.

The thoughtfulness permeates the whole design with an elegantly simple front panel: if you want to copy, press the Copy button; if you want to adjust the contrast, press the Darkness button. There's even a flat paper path available to complement the 250-sheet drawer input at the machine's base.

Workhorse duties are better seen to by Kyocera's FS-1020D. For light use, however, the SCX-4100 is nearly worthwhile on the strength of print quality alone. If you have the need for non-critical scanning and copying work, it becomes even more attractive.

Author: Ross Burridge