REVIEW: Samsung ML-1865 monochrome laserjet printer
Name: ML-1865 (Samsung)
Type: Monochrome laserjet printer
Specs: Click here for full specs
Price: £76 from Amazon
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In an age in which you can pick up a decent multi-functional colour inkjet printer and still get change back from £100 you’d be forgiven for believing that the days of the humble monochrome laserjet were numbered. However Samsung’s latest laserjet model, the ML-1865, may well sway naysayers who say that the monochrome printer is dead. Read on to find out why.
You could hardly call the black, curvy box build of the ML-1865 exciting, but there’s no denying it’s one of the smaller printers on the market, and that’s within its own streamlined single-function category as well as the traditionally-chunkier multi-function scanner-and-printer field. Measuring just 341 x 224 x 184mm, it’ll happily sit tucked away under a desk or on a cramped office tabletop. Open up the loading and output trays and those dimensions expand substantially of course, but either way it makes for a very portable printer that can easily be moved around a house or office with ease. Seeing as this is a USB-only model (no Wi-Fi networking here we’re afraid) it’s important that Samsung have made the ML-1865 this easy to shift about.
The ML-1865 can be loaded with 150 sheets of paper at a time, with an output tray that’ll hold 100 sheets before straining under the weight. Paired with a manual duplex mode, you’ll be able to leave the printer loaded up for quite a while without needing to fill it back up, which makes it particularly useful in print-heavy office environments. No-one likes to be the one whose document doesn’t come through because the printer has ran out of paper, do they?
Even for a monochrome laserjet, the ML-1865 spits out prints at a fantastic rate. It took about 1 minute 20 seconds for it to complete a 20 page document cycle, which works out at roughly a sheet every 4 to 5 seconds. Firing up from cold, the printer also performed impressively, getting to work in about 9 seconds. In terms of text quality at least, the printer was sharp and detailed, with no shaky edges or sliding lines in our heavily-formatted documents.
Though the box claims to have a print quality of up to 1200 dpi, we found that higher quality images in our print-outs suffered a little in detail and grey-level gradients. It’s unlikely that this printer will be your first port of call for image printing anyway however, and is more than capable of handling the odd graph or infographic.
Though overall a very basic printer in terms of features, the ML-1865 does have one stand-out function that we’d like to see hit more printers over time. That would be the One-Touch print ability, triggered via a dedicated button on the device itself. Using this allows you to print your PC screen exactly as it appears on your monitor (except in black and white, of course), carefully scaled down to fit onto a single page. Perfect if you quickly need to take down a hard copy of typed notes or work on a presentation with a team, it’s a nifty little function that we imagine would actually get quite a lot of use.
Verdict:
In terms of performance, it’s hard to argue with the quality of the Samsung ML-1865. It’s relatively pint-sized when it comes to printers, and though we’d like to have seen a little more detail in printed images, it does a sharp, fine job in pretty much every other department. The elephant in the room will always be colour multi-function kits however, and with an RRP of £79.99 the ML-1865 printer could do with being a little more competitive in that respect, or at least be packing Wi-Fi connectivity.
4 comments
for 47.94, you get the wireless version from tesco direct. 1685W. your review is totally wrong.
hello
I was searching for know the some printer quality.When i read it’s article,really great.
I was just looking for such features in a printer. I think my search for it ends here.
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