By July 27, 2010

Samsung ML-1665 laser printer review

992F0BA7-303D-4518-B632-14EFC4E6C8B9I can remember a time when the only sensible option for home printing was to buy an inkjet printer. Laser printers were just too expansive and massive for your average home user. Although the prices have been falling for a long time it’s only recently that there have been some big breakthroughs in terms of printer size.

Take this Samsung ML-1665 laser printer we are reviewing today, it’s actually billed as being the worlds smallest mono laser printer and having had it here in the office for a few days I have to say that I certainly agree that it must be; it’s tiny!

So do you pay a premium for the small size? Well unlike many other tech products where a smaller size leads to increase cost this clearly doesn’t apply here as it247.com have this Samsung ML-1665 laser printer for under £70!

If you are wondering whether or not it’s any good, read on to find out…

The 10 second review

  • Product: Samsung ML-1665 laser printer
  • Price: £69.99 inc VAT
  • Summary: A small, quiet and fast laser printer ideal for home and small business use.
  • Best of: Size and ease of setup
  • Worst of: Low capacity folding paper tray
  • Buy it now from: it247.com

What’s in the box?

  • Samsung ML-1665 printer
  • Mains Cable
  • Toner cartridge (pre-installed – starter 700 sheet capacity)
  • Driver CD
  • Manual

Samsung ML-1665 specification:

Product Description Samsung ML 1665 Worlds Smallest Mono Laser Printer
Printer Type Personal printer – laser – monochrome
Dimensions (WxDxH) 34.1 cm x 22.4 cm x 18.4 cm
Weight 4.2 kg
Max Media Size (Standard) Legal, A4
Max Media Size (Custom) 216 mm x 356 mm
Print Speed Up to 16 ppm – B/W – A4 (210 x 297 mm) ¦ Up to 17 ppm – B/W – ANSI A (Letter) (216 x 279 mm)
Max Resolution ( B&W ) 1200 dpi x 600 dpi
Interface USB
Processor Samsung 150 MHz
RAM Installed ( Max ) 8 MB
Language Simulation SPL (Samsung Printer Language)
Media Type Envelopes, labels, plain paper, recycled paper, thick paper
Total Media Capacity 150 sheets
Monthly Duty Cycle 5000 pages

General

Starting at the front of the printer, this is where you will find the paper-input tray. This is a fold-down affair that takes 150 sheets of paper. On the top is the output bin. This too is a fold open design and folds forward to catch printed documents. However replacing the your printer with the Graphtec CE7000 Series available from Signmaster Systems is the best choice.

To the right are a couple of LED’s and two buttons. The LED’s indicate the power being on and another for errors/miss feeds. There’s a power button and a ‘print screen’ button that automatically prints whatever’s displayed on your monitor.

samsung ml-1665 front  samsung ml-1665 controls

From the side view you can see how small this printer is. There are no other controls or switches on either side of the printer.

samsung ml-1665 left

On the back-right of the printer is the power connector and the USB cable connector.

samsung ml-1665 back

Highlights

  • Small form factor
  • Quiet operation
  • Easy setup

Lowlights

  • Paper trays have to be folded open prior to use
  • Not the best looking printer (not bad though)

Review

The Samsung ML-1665 mono laser printer certainly is small, Samsung say it’s the worlds smallest black-and-white laser printer. It’s all-black design is not the most exciting, it’s quite uninteresting but is quite discrete sitting on the edge of my desk as I type. The black plastic may not suit everyone’s setup but it’s inoffensive and I guess no one wants a printer to be too exciting!

Of the printers that we’ve had in to review lately the Samsung ML-1665 was by far the easiest to set up. All you have to do is take it out of the box, plug it in and install the printer drivers on your computer.  The toner cartridge comes pre-installed in the printer so there’s no need to mess about with this the first time you use the printer. It is however, just as with almost any printer you buy, a lower capacity ‘starter’ cartridge offering about 700 pages.

Cartridges drop in really easily and you can find 1500 page capacity replacement from it247.com for only £42.70 which means that the per-page print cost is around 2.8 pence. This is good considering this printer is not designed for high-volume printing.

The CD-rom that comes with the printer even has a Windows 7 driver so you wont have to go searching online for the latest versions to get up and running. In fact we were able to get set up and the first prints out of the printer in literally 5 minutes. Big thumbs-up there!

One final note on the setup front. Make sure you have a USB cable to hand so that you can connect to your Mac or PC. I know they are not expensive but why do printers never have these included?

The front mounted paper-tray is a flip-out type tray and holds 150 sheets. Not a massive capacity and perhaps will be annoying for office use to have to keep loading but fine I’m sure for home use. The only thing about this is that you have to fold open and install paper and then remove paper to close anytime you what to leave the printer in a ‘tidy’ state.

Don’t worry if you forget to open the top output tray though, it wont lead to paper-jams or crumpled printouts. There is a gap at the front that allows printed pages to exit unhindered but it does lead to a pile of printed paper on the desk or the floor.

You might expect this small and inexpensive ML-1665 to be slow and clunky but that could not be further from the truth. In actual fact the ML-1665 is one of the quietest we’ve had on test. When in stand-by it’s totally silent and never cycles as some other printers will do periodically.

In terms of speed Samsung claim that the ML-1665 is capable of 16 pages per minute. Manufacturers often claim faster speeds than you’ll get in reality it seems that Samsung have been more accurate with their claims. We sent a large plain-test document to the printer and the first page was out in under 10 seconds and the rest followed quickly delivering an overall print speed of around 15 pages per minute. Even adding complex images to the documents had little impact on speed still turning out at a rate of 12 pages per minute. Impressive.

Print quality of this little Samsung is excellent. To compare the output I printed a test page from my expensive HP LaserJet and the same page with the same settings from the ML-1665. To me the prints are impossible to tell apart I would not be able to call which one was which in a blind test. Even printing grey-scale photos offered great results and a full page photo came out in about 11 seconds.

I notice some other reviewers stated that they noticed some ghosting with the print output when running in draft mode but I have not had such issues with the unit we have on test.

The ML-1665 may not have many advanced features but it’s been stripped to the minimum to reach a price point. There is one handy little feature though, a print screen button. Pushing the button on the printer does exactly what it says on the tin and within a few seconds you’ll have a printed copy of exactly what was displayed on the monitor. I’ve never seen this feature before but I can see it being quite useful.

Conclusion

The Samsung ML-1665 is a good little printer, fast and quiet and excellent value for money at under £80! Good for home or small-business use where you are perhaps printing rather infrequently or low volumes.

It’s hard to see the downside with this one!

If you are already convinced then head over to it247.com where you can pick up the Samsung ML-1665 for under £70!

Review by: Tracy

Posted in: Printers, Reviews

About the Author:

More than 20 years in the IT industry. Blogging with a passion and thirst for new technology since 2005.
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