Samsung ML-1630W wireless network mono laser printer
A great-looking printer that's quick and quiet
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Review Laser printers aren’t the most photogenic of kit and you’d usually want to relegate one to an office or workroom. Samsung has given its latest offering a makeover, though.
Mono laser printers may have been eclipsed in the home by inkjets, but they’re faster and produce better black print. They’re also pug-ugly, built for function not looks. Not so Samsung's ML-1630W, which it claims is "based on the design of a Steinway piano".
Samsung's ML-1630W: inspired by a piano, apparently
It does have a glossy black case, but that’s black plastic, rather than polished wood, with all veneers for a single instrument taken from the same tree. But get past Samsung’s enthusiasm, and this is still a special-looking printer, very little like a conventional laser. The glossy black case looks something like a record deck and is a similar size, with a step at the front... yes, all right, it's a bit like a piano keyboard.
The control panel consists of a 13 x 5 matrix of blue LEDs which shine through its upper surface. As well as some animated blue symbols, this matrix reproduces simple words, like 'open', when the case is opened and the number of pages being printed, in case you forget.
The big, blue lights are largely cosmetic and look out of place against the four, little, red-LED icons, which light up for important things like errors: low paper, low toner and paper jam. A separate, blue LED for power and another for wireless connection complete the set, and there’s a touch-sensitive switch for standby. A second switch is ready to stop the current print job.
COMMENTS
2 to 3p a sheet?
Ouch. Even our all-in-one ink jet does better than that, albeit using non-Canon cartridges. Bet it's better at photo-printing too. Sure, it'll be slower, but you don't buy a laser like this one for high volume printing where speed really matters.
CLP-510, Ubuntu
I've got a CLP-510. Unlike the CLP-310, it's a bit of a boatanchor (check out online photos, it's like twice as big and probably 10x as big as the ML-1630W). But, I got it for like $250, color, duplex, works well for me. Don't know about the ML-1630W, but the CLP-510 uses a Xerox print engine. Ubuntu has a driver for it, when I used it about a year ago the color was a little off (I think that's fixed now). Samsung *also* has a binary-blob Linux driver for their printers, which hooked into cups nicely so it just shows as another choice of printer model (my recollection is the Ubuntu-supplied stuff was listed under "Samsung" and the company-supplied were under "SAMSUNG" 8-)
Since I'm on an Ubuntu box I looked, ML-1630 is listed. 1630W isn't, but it appears that's just the 1630 with wireless. JBR, I think you're in good shape!
agreed on the wifi setup
I got a Samsung CLP310 color laser a few months ago - US$196, incl tax and free shipping - rather nice-looking compact black unit, fairly light for a color laser @ 27 lbs., fairly quiet, too.
Have to agree with the rather painful wifi setup. The 'easy' setup didn't work, due to the printer being assigned a strange default IP address - a 191. iirc rather than the standard 192. that most home networks use.
Had to use a crossover ether cable (fortunately, supplied) to connect it directly to my PC, then use a little program on the install CD to manually assign a new address. Then I could at least see the printer.
However, the web-based interface refused to correctly load the Settings page to set up the wifi info (WPA passkey, etc.), returning an error message, using IE6 on w2k; using IE6 on XP did the trick. Still not sure why that should make a difference, unless it's some .NET thing.
Once set up, it works a charm.
B&W printing quality is, as on your reviewed model, lovely. Color is ... meh (and pokey, @ 4ppm) but, hey, it *is* color.
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