Samsung ML-2152W

Peripherals have so far taken second place in the wireless networking sprint. Your PCs and notebooks may all be wireless-equipped, but apart from the odd Bluetooth module printers are still resolutely cabled devices. But not any more - Samsung's ML-2152W laser has set a new trend by providing an 802.11b wireless interface.

This is fitted as a card at the back with an external antenna, while a 10/100BaseTX Ethernet port allows connection to your cabled network too. Both the 802.11b and Ethernet connections are also supported by an internal web server, which allows remote status reporting and easy network management from your web browser. It's all good stuff, with the exception of the fiddly set of software utilities required to set up the wireless connection.

But the wireless interface isn't the only thing that separates the ML-2152W from the network laser crowd; it's also so small it could almost pass for a high-capacity personal laser. The main body sits on top of a 500-sheet input feeder, which is drawer-loaded from the front, while a small paper-level indicator is fitted to the face of this drawer for convenience. There's also a built-in duplexer for two-sided printing, and if you need more capacity you can get an optional second 500-sheet feeder too.

The front panel above the main paper drawer folds down to reveal a sturdy 100-sheet multipurpose input tray, which can act as a straight-path face-up feeder when you open a rear panel. However, you wouldn't want to use this face-up tray too often - it's a bit basic and difficult to get at - but it's handy to have.

Next to the output tray, you'll find a two-line, backlit LCD status display along with the menu configuration buttons, although these are unlikely to get much use. More useful are the light-up Toner Save and Duplex buttons, which force all print jobs into these respective modes.

But this printer's main advantage is speed. Samsung's official speed is quoted as 20ppm, and we were able to achieve well over 17ppm with our 20-page plain text document. The first sheet in each plain-text print job was also completed in a respectable 15 seconds.

The image quality is good too, with the emphasis firmly on text and line art. Text documents remain readable right down to 3pt before the fonts begin to break up. The ML-2152W also produces fairly decent greyscale graphics for web pages, presentation handouts and photos, although the quality suffers when you try to push the resolution up - the best photo results are achieved at 600dpi. The Image Enhance feature also just adds a grainy linen effect, and 1,200dpi mode causes the whole image to go muddy. However, we experienced no compatibility problems with everyday Adobe PDF documents when using the printer's IPS-Print PostScript 3 emulation.

There are cheaper A4 network lasers on the market, but the ML-2152W doesn't skimp on the standard configuration: 600-sheet input, face-up and face-down output trays, a duplexer, PostScript 3 and PCL6, and 16MB of memory, not to mention wireless and Ethernet connectivity. If you're after wireless network printing, this is about the only thing out there and it offers reasonable, if not award-winning, printing.

Author: Alistair Dabbs