Saturday, April 6, 2013
The Samsung ML 1740 Laser Printer
OVERVIEW:
For those on a budget looking for a reliable monochrome laser printer, the Samsung ML-1740 offers no-frills, while producing sharp text printouts.
PROS:
When laser printers first came on the market, their sharp, smudge-proof ink made them the envy of anybody with a monochrome inkjet or thermal printer. However, their prices put them out of range of the home computer user. The Samsung ML-1740 provided an economic answer to an affordable laser printer.
At 17 pages per minute, this personal printer has a decent speed for a laser printer of its age. With current inkjets pushing B&W print speeds of 20 ppm, inkjets are now giving lasers a run for their money in performance.
The maximum resolution for the ML-1740 is a modest 600 x 600 dpi. This resolution is fine for creating sharp text and simple graphic images. Photographs will have a more grainy quality but still viewable.
To keep costs low and affordable, the ML-1740 comes with 8MB of memory. 8MB is large enough to print all but very detailed graphics or large Acrobat files. However problems may occur if the printer is shared across a workgroup as print jobs fill up the queue. For one office or cubicle, the ML-1740 can handle most single-user print needs.
The ML-1740 has a 250-sheet main paper tray. This is almost more than double the capacity of many other personal-use laser printers have. The tray has an adjustable rear lever to allow the ML-1740 hold 11” x 14” legal-size paper, while maintaining the same footprint on your desk. There are other Desktop laser printers with smaller footprints out there. But those often gain their small footprints by having a pull-down paper tray to temporarily add paper. Adding the 3,000-sheet capacity toner cartridge, the ML-1740 makes maintenance in an office easier with less frequent toner and paper refills.
Speaking of paper refills, the little mechanical lever on the front of ML-1740 that indicates how much paper is in the tray is an easy, simple way to know when to refill at a glance.
The ML-1740 is one of the more quieter ML printers. It produces 50dB of sound during startup and printing, 30dB on standby, plus a sleep mode that makes the ML-1740 run silent until needed. To give you an idea on the amount of noise this means, 53 decibels is about the sound of low conversations and 30 decibels is the noise from a quiet office.
When Samsung introduced this printer on the market, USB was still new to Wintel machines and parallel the primary way to connect non-networked printers to a computer. While PC’s with a parallel interface have become few and far between, it’s nice to free up a USB port if your computer still has a parallel port. You get that choice with the ML-1740. The USB also makes it easy to connect a laptop to the printer.
CONS:
Unlike similar laser printers with 50-sheet multi-purpose trays, the ML-1740 has a 1-sheet manual feed slot. So, if you want to print 30 invitations from a Word mailing list you will have to stay by the printer feeding the envelopes one at a time.
On the top of the printer, Samsung has 1 button and 2 LEDs for your manual print controls and status indicators. Depending how long you press that button can cause your printer to perform several other functions than just “cancel”. And, if you want to know just what the various flashing LEDs are telling you, you’ll need the User’s Manual to find the flash codes. (Or you can do what I did: copy the page and taped it on the printer.) I can see Samsung wanting to follow the K.I.S.S approach to a console control, but this went past K.I.S.S. all the way to M.I.C.K. (Made It Complex, Kretin)!
It takes the ML-1740 thirty seconds after it wakes-up to print. Add that plus the 12-second delays between print jobs, the ML-1740 has one of the longer start times of the Samsung ML series. Think of the ML-1740’s warm-up time like the old vacuum-tube T.V. sets. If you ever heard your parents or grandparents talk about how long it took TV’s to “warm-up” when they were kids, this printer will give you a rough idea what they went through.
INK / TONER NEEDS:
The cartridge is used in the ML-1740 (the same toner used for the ML-1750 and ML-1755 printers) has a 3,000 page print capacity. On the other hand, the toner that you get with your new ML-1740 comes with toner that is only one-thirds full. So it might be a good idea to buy the full yield toner the same time you buy the printer.
SOFTWARE:
It’s nice that Samsung recognizes there are other operating systems than the one from Redmond. The CD that comes with the ML-1740 provides software support for Windows, Mac OS 8.6-9.x, and Linux operating systems. The Samsung web site offers new drivers you can download for Mac OS 10.3 up to the new 10.6 Snow Leopard systems.
