Samsung Color Laser Printer

A great all-in-one printer for small businesses who want to stay productive. It has everything a business could want, and it provides high-quality laser prints in rich color. Be prepared to bring a friend or two to help you move it, particularly if you've got to go up or down stairs, but once it's in place, it will get the job done right.

The Samsung CLX-6200FX is an all-in-one color laser printer made for businesses. With a color copier, scanner, and fax built in, it can do pretty much everything you'll ever need done in an office. It also offers some nice extras. For example, a direct USB interface allows PDF, JPEG, and other files to be printed directly from a USB drive. A scan to e-mail function simplifies the scanning process, while you can also scan directly to a USB drive or to the network. I liked the paper-handling convenience; a 250-sheet cassette and duplexer means fewer trips to the printer.

Like other laser printers, it takes some time for the first page to come out; in my tests it was from 25 to 27 seconds; after that the printer lives up to its claim of 20 pages per minute. Prints look great and the color is amazingly rich and deep; in some cases the copies actually looked better than the originals! Scanning was likewise fast and efficient, though I stayed away from the software package that was included, as it seemed to be easier to use Windows to manage that task.

The printer uses four toner cartridges (black, yellow, magenta, cyan) which Samsung says will last for 2,500 pages of printing), so while the consumable cost may be high, you won't need to change cartridges often unless you do an awful lot of printing (Samsung guesses around 10 cents per page color, 2.4 cents for monochrome prints).

Laser printers tend to be bulky, and multifunction laser printers are beasts. This one is no exception, weighing in at almost 80 pounds and in a carton so wide that it almost didn't fit through my doorway. You'll need a sturdy table to set it up on and a lot of space; it's a foot-and-a-half wide and more than two feet tall.