Samsung ML6100N

It's even more difficult to separate the two printers when it comes to running costs. In both cases, the manufacturers claim that the cartridge lasts for 5,000 pages at five per cent coverage, with the Samsung's replacement cartridges costing just £2 more than those of the HP.

The ML6100N proved quite straightforward to setup on a network. Samsung's SyncThru utility can't match JetAdmin from HP for user-friendliness, and it doesn't allow you to assign printing privileges or create group and user objects, but in practice you should have the ML6100N up and running using NetWare 5 in 15 minutes. More importantly, there's full support for NDS and DHCP, and the network card contains an embedded HTTP server that you can access using a Web browser over TCP/IP. It's also a 10/100 BaseT card as opposed to the 2100TN's 10 BaseT.

Many potential buyers will require more than slightly faster print speeds and - arguably - marginally superior print quality to dissuade them from opting for the HP. When the 2100TN has a £28 lower street price as well, Samsung may have to rethink its pricing strategy for the ML6100N to make an impact.

Author: Tim Danton