Samsung ML-6060

Despite the recent flood of low-priced, high-quality inkjet printers, there's been comparatively little movement on the budget laser front, with Samsung's 6050 (reviewed issue 57, p153) dominating our A List for over a year now. This looks set to change now, however, with the Kyocera FS-1000 (reviewed p179) and Samsung's update to the 6050 - the ML-6060, both coming under scrutiny in this issue. The inkjet trend of increasing quality and decreasing price has steadily been extending to laser printers, and Samsung's new ML-6060 looks set to follow.

The ML-6060 sits in the mid-range of Samsung's new range of laser printers, offering 12ppm print speeds, 4Mb of RAM and an impressive 550-sheet paper tray for an affordable £262. The ML-6060N is the next model up and is identical except for the addition of a 10/100 BaseTX Ethernet adaptor, which can also be installed in the ML-6060 at a later date, providing a useful upgrade path.

Stunning performance and features aren't usually expected for such a modest price, but the ML-6060 proved to be a very pleasant surprise. The core of the print engine is powered by a 66MHz RISC processor and is supported by 4Mb of RAM. This is a fairly standard configuration for a printer of this class, being similar to the Lexmark Optra E312 (reviewed issue 71, p168) with its 67MHz Toshiba processor and the Kyocera FS-1000 - although the latter boasts a slightly faster 75MHz PowerPC processor.

Like the Lexmark and Kyocera, the ML-6060 offers just 4Mb of RAM as standard, which is disappointing given the current low cost of memory, and is also limiting if you often print large graphics-heavy documents. The good news, however, is that it takes standard 72-pin EDO SIMMs rather than proprietary modules, so you've got a cheap and easy upgrade path to its maximum 68Mb capacity. Another impressive feature is the capacious 550-sheet paper tray. This accommodates 300 more sheets than the Kyocera and a massive 400 sheets more than the Lexmark, which will save time wasted reloading paper in busy offices.

Performance tests kicked off with a 50-page plain text document, which was completed in four minutes, 13 seconds, making for an impressive 11.85ppm. This is a whisker short of Samsung's stated 12ppm, although the marginal difference is small enough to be negligible. Print quality was also superb, with crisp, sharp text and excellent scaling. This performance is particularly impressive when compared to the Kyocera and Lexmark, which both cost more, and only offer 10ppm claimed print speeds.

Next up was the 24-page DTP document - designed to test the printer's ability to cope with text and graphics -æand this started to push the Samsung's limits, slowing it down to 7.8ppm. Clearly, this speed is limited by the 4Mb of RAM bottleneck, and could be increased with a simple memory upgrade. On the positive side, the quality was excellent, and although graphics showed a slight lack of contrast, reprinting after adjusting the dithering options improved matters. Despite the relatively slow print speed, the Samsung is still almost level with the Lexmark, which managed 8.2ppm on the same task, and significantly faster than the Kyocera, which could only turn out 3.5ppm.

The Samsung maintained this level of performance with the Excel spreadsheet test, returning an excellent 11.76ppm - again satisfactorily close to the stated 12ppm print speed. The often difficult task of printing black text on full-colour shaded backgrounds was managed well at 10pt font sizes and above, but the text became blurred at anything lower. However, the results were cleaner than those produced by the Kyocera and also slightly better than those from the Lexmark.