Samsung ML-1665 review

£71
Price when reviewed

Samsung boldly claims to have made the world’s smallest monochrome laser printer with its ML-1665, and we wouldn’t quibble. It’s the most compact we’ve come across (with the input and output trays folded away) and certainly won’t take up much room on your desk, measuring just 341 x 224 x 184mm (WDH).

The overall design is pleasingly stylish as well – all soft curves and gloss-black plastic, with only two buttons and two power lights to blemish the finish, and a single USB port for connecting it to your PC. There’s no room in the budget for anything as fancy as an Ethernet port or wireless.

Overall print quality in our technical tests was good, but with some flaws. Text, as you’d expect of any laser, looked clear and sharp, even when printed on a grey background, but image quality wasn’t up to the same standard. Despite the 1,200 x 600dpi resolution, photos exhibited a noticeable dithering pattern, regardless of the settings we used, and some banding was evident too.

Samsung ML-1665

Speed, meanwhile, although just shy of the advertised 16ppm, wasn’t far off at 15ppm across most of our printing tests. That’s about as much as you need from a small desktop laser printer.

Where the ML-1665 falls down a little is in running costs. There’s a 700-page starter cartridge in the box, and standard 1,500-page cartridges retail for £38 (£44 inc VAT) each thereafter, which means it costs just below 2.9p per A4 page. While this isn’t particularly pricey, its stablemate – the Samsung ML-2525 – is cheaper to run. Compounding this, there’s no high-yield cartridge option and no ink-saving draft print option either.

The ML-1665 is a competent laser for low-volume use. It isn’t overly expensive and takes up very little room, but if you plan to print a lot, we’d clear some desk space and opt for its bigger brother instead. For around £15 more, the ML-2525 offers a similar print and build quality with faster speeds and a more economical price per page.

Basic Specifications

Colour? no
Resolution printer final 1200 x 600dpi
Rated/quoted print speed 16PPM
Maximum paper size A4
Duplex function no

Running costs

Cost per A4 mono page 2.9p
Cost per A4 colour page N/A

Consumables

Standard mono toner life 1,500 pages
High-yield mono toner life N/A
Standard colour toner life N/A
High-yield colour toner life N/A
Supplied mono toner life 700 pages
Supplied colour toner life N/A

Power and noise

Dimensions 341 x 224 x 184mm (WDH)
Peak power consumption 773W
Idle power consumption 2W

Performance tests

Mono print speed (measured) 15.0ppm
Colour print speed N/A

Media Handling

Input tray capacity 250 sheets
Output tray capacity 100 sheets

Connectivity

USB connection? yes
Ethernet connection? no
Bluetooth connection? no
PictBridge port? no

OS Support

Operating system Windows 7 supported? yes
Operating system Windows Vista supported? yes
Operating system Windows XP supported? yes
Operating system Windows 2000 supported? yes
Operating system Windows 98SE supported? no
Other operating system support Mac OS X 10.3-10.6
Software supplied None

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