Samsung SF-5800P

The past year has seen plenty of multifunction devices targeting the lucrative SoHo market, although the majority have forsaken fax functions and provide printing, scanning and copying facilities alone. Canon's MultiPASS L60 (reviewed issue 54, p179), however, did integrate all four functions and now Samsung has released the SF-5800P. This is its second offering for the small office and comes some six months after it announced the MJ-4500C, which is built around a colour inkjet.

At the heart of the 5800P is a true 600 « 600dpi mono laser with a quoted top speed of 8ppm. Scanning and copying are dealt with by a basic 300ppi scanner unit positioned behind the front control panel, while an integrated 14.4Kbits/sec modem looks after incoming and outgoing fax transmissions and supports both Class 1 and 2 fax services. An automatic feeder has room for 150 sheets of A4 plus a single-sheet manual feed in front, while the scanner unit has its own feeder for up to 30 sheets. Along with a line socket for phone connection, a second RJ-11 port at the rear allows a handset or answering machine to be connected. The toner cartridge (£70) is the only consumable and lasts for 5,000 pages at five per cent coverage, which equates to reasonable running costs of 1.4p per page.

Samsung supplies a comprehensive software bundle collectively called SmarThru that extends fax, copying and scanning control over the 5800P to the host PC. You also get Samsung's AnyPage OCR software, and you can use the 5800P to send and receive email. It's worth noting that the integrated modem only supports speeds of 14.4Kbits/sec for data, so emails with large attachments may take some time to transmit. We also found this the trickiest part of SmarThru to set up, as the accompanying documentation gives Internet access configuration a wide berth. In fact, we found some functions of the 5800P more difficult to set up and use than should reasonably be expected considering the target market. After installation, Windows Dialling properties defaulted to using pulse dial instead of tone, and the SmarThru Fax Gate service must be set to automatically answer incoming calls otherwise the 5800P will print them out instead of routing them to the host PC. Small networks may wish to share the printer part of the 5800P but, once again, the documentation avoids this subject. Suffice to say that we achieved this aim, but the driver installation on our other clients was difficult.

The 5800P can act as a standalone fax machine and copier, and has a comprehensive control panel with a fast-dial keypad for storing frequently used numbers. Resolution and contrast can be modified with storage capacity for up to 30 faxes available in the resident 2Mb of memory for scheduling transmissions at preset times. A broadcast option also allows a fax to be sent to multiple predefined locations. Manual copying is simple as you load your document. Press the copy button and select the number of copies using the dial keypad. You can adjust resolution and contrast, and output sizes can be modified from 50 to 200 per cent of the original.

SmarThru provides a single interface to all PC-based operations, although it doesn't automatically sense when a document has been loaded in the printer. Documents can be copied or scanned and stored on the host PC, sent as a fax or incorporated directly into an email message as an attachment. Alternatively, they can be exported directly to the OCR software for conversion and saved in text, HTML or RTF formats.