printer and another guide

The Samsung ML 2240 Laser Printer

OVERVIEW:  Unless it’s your job or you’re a student, most people don’t use their printers on a regular basis. If you have an inkjet printer at home and haven’t used your printer in a couple of months, the ink has dried and likely needs to be replaced. Toner for laser printers starts out as dry ink, allowing for a longer shelf life and lower printing costs. This makes laser printers the ideal solution for the casual printer user.  But until recently the high price of laser printers placed them out of the home consumer’s reach. Now, Samsung has the ML-2240: a monochrome laser (that’s the “ML” in ML-2240) printer designed for the casual printer who doesn’t want a printer that takes up a lot of space.

PROS:
The 150-sheet pull-out multi-purpose paper tray has an adjustable tongue to handle paper sizes from postcard-size 3” x 5” up to legal-size 8 ½” x 14”. On other printers having two paper trays, the most their multi-purpose trays can hold is 50 pages. Since both trays are combined on the ML-2240, the printer has almost three times the holding capacity for printing on envelopes, transparencies, and card stock.
Following a similar design found with many inkjet printers, Samsung has the ML-2240 with a pull-down paper tray. This tray can be folded back up when the printer is not in use to save on desk space.
Samsung printers come with a Toner Save mode. In the case of the ML-2240 it saves up to 30% toner with good quality prints, increasing the toner life to almost 2000 pages.

For an affordable, bare-bones laser printer, the ML-2240 prints extremely fast. After the initial warm-up time, letter-size paper prints at about 23 pages per minute.  In operation, the ML-2240 produces 51 dB of sound, and 33dB in standby. 54dB is the sound of low conversations and 30 decibels you can think of as a quiet office. The noise won’t be annoying unless you’re spooling off a 100-page blog from the Internet non-stop. But at 23 pages per minute, you’re likely run out of paper before the noise gets on your nerves anyway.
Having a maximum resolution of 1200 x 600 dpi, the ML-2240 is great for printing text and simple graphics. Photographs will have a more grainy quality, and if you are a stickler for details the ML-2240 resolution may not have the sharpness you desire. But even in Toner Save mode, printouts are still clear and readable.

Unlike parallel, the printer’s USB interface makes connections easy across different computers, laptops, and platforms. While the USB printer cable is not included (a typical practice among all printer companies), buying a USB printer cable today is still a lot cheaper than buying IEEE 1284 parallel cables for older printers.
Another nice feature Samsung provides is software support for the “Big 3 OSes”: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Now you don’t have to be locked to one operating system just because your printer only supports one.

CONS:
To start, the ML-2240 takes from 9 to 19 seconds before printing commences. This only becomes a problem if you’re in a rush to get something before you run off to work. Just think of the ML-2240’s longer 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 have a rough idea what they went through.

If you have an older computer that had only 2 USB ports and a parallel port, you will have to sacrifice one USB device because the ML-2240 only has a USB connection. However, there are “Parallel to USB” adaptor cables being sold by various vendor to enable your computer to use its parallel port for USB printers.
As expected for a printer of this size, Samsung only installed a fixed 8MB RAM for the ML-2240. 8MB is fine for text printing, but large Adobe files and graphics will fill up the ML-2240’s memory and will slow printing. There is no PostScript or even the standard HP Printer Control Language (PCL) emulator. Instead Samsung uses a proprietary printer emulator. Most users won’t notice any changes in the way things print, unless they use a lot of advanced features in any high-end graphic or photo editing software.

The ML-2240 only has a 150-sheet tray capacity, requiring frequent refilling if you’re a power printer. But again, the ML-2240 is designed for the casual printer user, not for a classroom or office workload. For casual printing, the tray capacity is plenty.

There are no options on the ML-2240 for expansion of memory, paper capacity, or network capability. Remember, this printer gives you the bare necessities.

INK / TONER NEEDS:
A big disappointment is the ML-2240 does not come shipped to the U.S. with a full toner cartridge. (Although it’s shipped to China with the full cartridge—go figure.) This so-called “starter” toner  prints about 700 pages. That’s half the capacity of a standard toner cartridge, so it may be a good idea to buy the extra toner the same time you buy the printer.

The ML-2240 uses a toner cartridge with a standard yield of about 1,500 pages, (and about 1,900 pages in toner saver mode).

The Samsung does not offer a high-capacity toner for the ML-2240.

SOFTWARE:
The ML-2240 has one of the better software packages. Not only does it have the basic printing properties for Mac and Linux systems, but for Windows systems there’s also an advanced printing section that allows for booklet printing, creating a large poster mosaics, and watermarks.

The compact design makes the ML-2240 an ideal monochrome printer for light-duty home and personal use. It’s lower yield toner, memory, and shorter duty cycle however makes the ML-2240 impracticable for office use. -- Mel Myers