printer and another guide

The Samsung ML 3050 Laser Printer

OVERVIEW:  There comes a time when you need a personal laser printer that can handle more throughput than typical personal printers, but you also want it to be able to handle future demands as a shared or network printer. The solution is Samsung’s ML-3050 monochrome laser printer.

PROS:
The ML-3050’s compact design & footprint takes up only a 1.9 square foot area on a table, while able to still hold legal-size paper within its tray.
Prints come out at an impressive 30 pages per minute. It does take 44 seconds for the ML-3050 to warm up from a cold boot, but once it’s up this laser will start chugging away.

At 1200 x 1200 dpi B&W resolution, the ML-3050 keeps text sharp--even at 6-point font sizes--and does a decent job with graphics. To keep from consuming too much toner, the printer has a 600 dpi resolution with a text-enhance or image-enhance switch.  The Toner Save feature allows for a 40% toner life increase while keeping images clear and readable.

The ML-3050 comes standard with a 250-sheet cassette tray, with an optional second 250-sheet stacking cassette. The flip-door reveals a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray that can handle transparencies, labels, post cards, envelopes, 3” x 5” postcards up to 8½” x 14” legal paper of various bond weights.
The control panel on the ML-3050 has a multi-line LCD Display, plus several buttons that make manual control of the printer relatively intuitive. Through the control panel, printer information, configuration, and emulation settings can be done.

This laser printer comes stock with 16MB of memory, allowing the ML-3050 to easily handle workloads from a single computer. An additional DIMM RAM slot is available to expand printer memory up to 272MB.

Understanding the printing needs of today’s businesses in providing support for the major software applications, Samsung has installed a full set for print emulators that should satisfy the most diverse office. Emulators include PostScript3, HP PCL6, IBM ProPrinter, and EPSON.

CONS:
Since its siblings--the ML-3051N and ND--come stock with 64MB of memory, it’s surprising to find the ML-3050 only comes with 16MB.  While 16MB is more than enough for most single-user printing needs and additional memory can be bought, it would have been nice for the ML-3050 to have come standard with at least 32MB RAM built-in.

The printer produces 54dB of sound printing, idling at 39 dB. To give you an idea of what that means, 60 decibels is the level of typical conversations and 40 decibels is the level of whispering. You probably don’t want to have this network printer stationed in a conference room printing when a meeting is in progress. But when it’s placed in the copy room or in the middle of a busy office floor, the noise is barely noticeable.

With more bells and whistles than other ML printers, warming up takes the ML-3050 about 35 seconds -- 44 seconds if in Sleep mode. From Standby it takes 8.5 seconds between print jobs. Delays like this are unacceptable if the printer is for a single user.  In a network environment where it usually takes a user about 3 to 5 minutes to pick up their printout, the delay is hardly noticeable.

INK/TONER NEEDS:
The ML-3050’s toner and drum are integrated in a single cartridge, making it easy to maintain. Right out the box, the printer comes with the standard size toner, able to print up to 4,000 pages.  An 8,000 double-capacity toner option is also available to double the time between toner replacements.

SOFTWARE:
The ML-3050 has one of the better software packages. Not only does it have the basic printing properties for Mac and Linux, but for Windows users there’s an advanced printing section that allows for booklet printing, creating a large poster mosaics, and watermarks.

The drivers also enable 64-bit and Microsoft Server operating systems to be able to use the ML-3050. This may be considered a no-brainer, but there are printers with software that absolutely will not install on Server 2003 & 2008.