Samsung ML-1665 review

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.

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.