printer and another guide

With the Muratec MFX-3050 you can get all the features of four office machines into one chassis thanks for multifunction technology. These kinds of devices are becoming increasingly popular as they offer savings on space, money, power and time.

The MFX-3050 is a monochrome printer, copier, scanner and fax all in one. It is ideal for the sole trader, small office or workgroup being both quick and quiet. Noise travels a long way in small spaces, but Muratec thought of that with this device.

The printing function is good, and quick. It can produce prints up to a resolution of 600 dpi at a rate of 30 pages per minute. The print quality is very good, with text on our test document sharp, with crisp, clear edges and good toner fill, especially in larger points.

Images were equally promising, with no banding, distortion or fading. They were accurate and clear, with the shading even, what more do you need from a mono office printer?

The same can be said for the copier, which uses the same elements as the printer. The ability to copy to or from the desktop is also a neat feature to have. Both the printer and copier are served by a 500 page paper drawer which is unfortunately not expandable.

Scanning can be done at a native resolution of 4800 x 600 dpi, which produces good results. You can scan to or from a USB drive or from the network. The software package includes tools to scan straight to pdf or email too.

The fax is fully featured, with all the features you would expect from one. Fast dial, phonebook, broadcast and the ability to email faxes to specific workstations. There is a 50 page document feeder on the top and enough built-in memory to store up to 600 pages of faxes should you run out of paper.

The enclosed toner is good for around 1000 pages, replacements will go to 8000. As the MFX-3050 is aimed at the lower duty cycle user, running costs should be minimal. The cartridges are readily available from online retailers like Quikshiptoner.com who offer much better prices than the manufacturer or other retail outlets.

As a multifunction device, the MFX-3050 is a good prospect. It produces quality documents, is cheap to own, with a reasonable cost per page. It doesn’t take up too much room and is pretty quiet when it’s working. This is one device that a home worker should be able to work with.

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.