Samsung SCX-4500 Monochrome Laser Printer

There's a lot to like about this monochrome laser printer. It's quiet, fast, efficient, and very cool looking. If you're not doing a lot of printing, that might be enough to make you buy it; but I'd spend extra money to get a monochrome laser printer with built-in duplexing and networking capabilities.

Hands down, this is the best looking and quietest printer I've ever tested. With glossy piano-black finish and a buttonless smooth surface (the soft-touch sensors sit in the top right corner), a very cool blue LED status light, and a melodic chirp instead of an annoying tone, it looks like a prop from a science-fiction movie.

As laser printers should be, this one is quite fast, putting out pages from a large PDF file in just over three seconds (the first page took about 19 seconds, in line with Samsung's estimate of a 15-second warmup). And what can be said of the print quality except that it's excellent, again as a laser should be? Fonts of course are crisp and sharp with no bleed into the paper as can be seen with inkjet printers.

For large print jobs, though, the SCX-4500 is not my first choice, simply because it doesn't have an automatic document feeder, nor can it duplex print automatically. To me, those are fairly serious drawbacks, since I tend to print a lot. And since the printer doesn't come all that cheap (though most places had it for under $300), you won't have to spend a lot more for a monochrome laser printer that has those options.

If your printing demands are light, however; and if your office demands style; then I heartily recommend it. Especially if you want to feel that you're living in the not-too-distant future.