When the task at hand is simple high quality black and white printing, you can’t do much better than this small laser printer from Samsung.

Priced at less than $100.00, the ML-1665 provides the basic print functions for home and office from a small and easy to use black box – there’s just one USB2 cable connection, just a couple of buttons, even the toner cartridge (a one-piece, slide-in unit) is a breeze to insert or replace.

That ease-of-use extends to the One Touch button, unique as far as I know to laser printers like this; it lets you immediately print screen grabs of open windows on your PC. That’s handy for quickly capturing and printing online transactions or other interesting web pages from which you need hard copies.

The other button engages and releases a power-saving stand-by mode; two top mounted LEDs confirm power and incoming data states.

Now, the unit prints monochrome only, so if you need to print colour documents, you’ll need a different printer. There is a manual front loading paper tray, but no single-sheet feeder.  The paper path supports single-sided printing, so if you want or need to print on both sides, you’ll need a different unit – or re-load the paper yourself for manual, second side printing.

That being understood, the ML-1665 is efficient and enjoyable to use in a small business or home office.

It’s quite small when sitting idle, with an attractive glossy finish and dust-resistant cover. When the paper feeder and catch trays are extended, however, you will a few extra inches (several centimetres)  of space in front and back while the printer’s in operation. The tray holds about 150 sheets.

And when it is printing, you’ll barely notice – it’s very quiet, rated at 49 dBA, about the same as a fridge.

It’s also rated as fairly fast: 16 pages per minute for regular A4 paper, and about eight and a half seconds for something called FPOT, or first page output time.

In printing off a number of text pages and number charts during this evaluation, we got to about 14 ppm with a 20 page document. A larger job, consisting of five sets of about 50 pages, took us almost 20 minutes, roughly a 12.5 ppm rating (reloading the tray adds time).

More complex documents, those with text and graphics, took a bit longer – more like 9 or 10 ppm.

For general-purpose home or office use, the 600 x 1,200 dpi images look fine. There’s good detail and clarity in smaller fonts, and solid blacks for lines, rules and other graphic elements. Some banding was noticeable in documents with dense text or constant fill, but this was not a really objectionable or consistent issue.

Testing an already tested unit, we were informed that the toner cartridge was about half full, and therefore we should get about 350 printed pages from it.  

At first surprising, the estimate now makes sense – note that the printer ships with a Starter Cartridge, rated to about 700 pages. That’s about half the expected output of a full up purchased replacement cartridge, rated by the manufacturer at about 1,500 pages.

While toner cartridges are available online, and some are ‘no-name’ brands at less cost, Samsung prices the replacement cartridge at $52.00.  That’s about 3.5 cents per page (paper cost not included), but it is safe to say that ‘results will vary based on experience’ – and the density of text on your documents, the length of the page (letter vs. legal) and whether or not you use the software-enabled ‘Toner’ Saver’ setting.

We found, too, that printing pictures or complex screen grabs from the Web will reduce the total printing capacity, and slow down the fast output times.

So, if what you need is a simple printer for basic correspondence, documents and screen captures, the Samsung ML-1665 fits the bill without costing you a bundle.

It’s a handy little mono laser printer, fairly quick, relatively quiet and very simple to set up.

Samsung supports Windows and OS X, and drivers for Linux are also available.

To learn more about the Samsung ML-1665 laser printer, visit the company’s website.