Customer Reviews

Samsung ML1740 Laser Printer

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

ML-1740 is an excellent printer for use with a single PC at home or small business.

Pro's,
1. Excellent print quality, much better than any inkjet would.
2. Drum and toner are a single unit. So there are no drum replacement costs unlike Minolta 1350W or Brother laser printers.
3. Toner/drum costs are very low, can be refilled at home easily 2-3 times (just pull out the round black cap & pour in the black powder).
4. Fast print speeds, again much more than inkjets.
5. Small, decent looking and light weight.
6. Has an internal paper tray (250 pages) like a real laser.
7. Toner saver mode for times when you don't need the best quality.
8. Low printer price after rebate and deals at local stores.

Con's,
1. It makes a lot of noise, more than an inkjet. More than HP 1012 (its also bigger than 1012).
2. The included toner is a starter one. (1000 pages instead of 3000 on a standard one)
3. Paper curls more than one would like.
4. Takes 30 secs to come out of sleep mode.
5. Seems to consume a lot of power, house lights flicker when printer turns on (but not as bad as Minolta).
6. Refilled toner starts to leak after about 2 refills (probably because of expsoure to light?).

Overall this a great printer with excellent print quality. Dump your inkjet and get this laser now!

I needed to replace my ancient basic Brother laser printer (which at the time many years ago, cost over $500 as I recall).

Samsung had the reputation of relatively low-quality in the past, though they have been more committed to quality these last few years. I overcame my initial "brand aversion" after reading a few good reviews here and elsewhere.

So far, I've haven't printed very much (as expected) but I did just print out a 131-page instruction manual on some cheap grocery-store brand paper stock without a hitch.

Not particularly quiet, but that is not a concern of mine.

A couple nice features that I'll probably never use include being able to print a "watermark" such as "Sample" or "Confidential" on the first or all pages, rotating the print, and shrinking to fit the page.

One option I recommend is the "toner saver mode", accessible from the interface or a button on the printer. Although you get a "starter" toner cartridge, replacements go for about $79, though re-charged ones might be available for less.

I scavenged a USB cord from my scanner, and hooked it up that way although there is a parallel port option. You need your own cable in either case.

(...)

My present inkjet printer is great for small jobs and color printing, but it lacks the speed that I need when printing lots of text. I printed a 265 page document, (which took about 40 minutes) and went to the copy center to make three more. When they told me how much it would cost, I realized that for the price of three copies, I could just go and buy my own personal laser printer. I did some comparative shopping and ended up with the economy minded Samsung ML 1740 laser printer. Here are my first impressions (no pun intended) of this printer.

The unit comes packaged with toner, the printer itself, manuals, CD installation disk, power cord, but no USB cable. You'll have to provide that yourself. The printer is a very compact unit and is about the size of a small microwave oven. The whole body of the printer is made of plastic, rather fragile looking, but nice. Setup took less than twenty minutes and is simple as falling off a long. After installing the necessary software, and connecting the USB cable from the printer to my computer, I printed out a test page which was very sharp and clear. The printer is easy to load with paper and has a 250 page capacity. Very nice. Paper exit trays are from the top of the printer or from the rear exit. You can choose which exit the paper comes out of. Generally speaking, the top exit is good for general printing, and the rear exit is for printing envelopes or thicker paper stock. The rear paper exit is 'straight through' compared to the top exit which makes the paper do a 'U-turn' before coming out.

The printer is very user friendly and has great software.(Note: From reports, this printer does not seem to work with Macs.) I was able to print up that 265 page document without a hitch. There is a toner saver button on the top of the printer. When this button is activated, the printer only uses 40% of the toner, which extends the life of the cartridge. Since I was only printing out text, the difference between full mode and toner saver mode was not important. The full toner mode looks richer and darker, but the saver mode was quite acceptalbe in quality. After finishing, I needed to print up a 225 page manual for my digital camera. I was able to print up four images to a page with the Samsung printer software, and shrunk the entire manual down to just 57 pages. There were quite a few photos and halftone illustrations in the manual. These turned out very good, even in the save toner mode. The dpi (dots per inch) is 600dpi or 300dpi for this printer. I found that 600dpi is just fine for text. The characters and letters were very sharp with no 'jaggies'. This little unit produces quite a bit of heat, so the ML-1740 has a powerful fan to keep the printer cool. I didn't find the fan noise distracting or irritating. The printer cartridge will give you about 1,000 printed pages in regular mode and about 60% more in toner saver mode. The cartridge that comes with this printer is a 'starter' cartridge, which means it is not completely filled with the standard amount of toner. Though there have been some gripes about this, it is easy enough to refill the spent cartridge with a refill kit at a fraction of the cost in buying a new one.

This printer is an excellent value because of the rebate programs associated with this device. Consider the Samsung 1740 if you are on a budget and want an easy to operate, efficient, 'bare-bones' laser printer. Highly recommended.

Purchased this printer in Sept. after reading all the great reviews. Unfortunately, I cannot support all the raves. I have had nothing but problems since I purchased this printer (a great price after rebate)from Amazon. After it prints three or four pages, something happens where a window comes up and says, it is out of paper when the paper storage is completely full. This happens several times a day and I think that it is overheating or something similar since I shut if off for five minutes, and I can then print another four copies. I tried several times to get Samsung Tech Service and I get a recorded message that Samsung is experiencing difficulties and to call back. They're not the only ones having difficulties. I've decided to get another reliable Canon which I have on my other PC, which I have had for a couple of years without problems and just chalk the Samsung up as a "loser".

This is a great printer, it's fast without compromising quality. The toner replacement is around $70, which is on the high side for laser printers in this class. But I looked into refill kits and found that you can refill your toner 9 or 10 times for the same price as buying 1 replacement, it's worth checking out.

I got this printer for home use after years of using super-fancy laser printers at my office. (...) the printer is pretty amazing: excellent text quality, good graphics, and extremely fast printing (even at 600dpi). I would not use this printer to print all my family pictures on it, but for any graphics you'd come across it will do fine.

Setting it up was trivial with Win98 and XP. If you use linux, the setup utility will blow you away: it provides all the functionality and controls of the windows driver. It literally took about 2 minutes to set up under Mandrake 9.2 with CUPS (using the USB port). Go Samsung, go Linux!
I've read reviews complaining about the noise level of the printer... I find it pretty normal, nothing to worry about.
I am not sure how well it will last since I've only had it for a few hours, but again from other reviews it seems there are no major problems.
I've set mine to use the "toner save" feature and I can't see any degradation in the quality of the printouts.
Anyway. Get this printer and you won't be sorry!

This is only the second review I have ever left at Amazon, but I thought our experience might possibly help other people make an informed decision.

We bought a Samsung ML1740 from a company other than Amazon. We chose it mainly because it was such a good price--about $88, quite a bit cheaper than the HP LaserJet 1012. It also had some nice features, particularly the large lock-in paper tray.

We set it all up and printed a page and it seemed quite a snazzy little printer. It wasn't until later that I realized the page had printed off center by over 1/8 of an inch. In other words, quite noticeably.

I called Samsung and told the CS person my problem. He suggested that I change the margins. I assumed he meant that there was a magical way to change the margin settings within the printer software. But no, it turned out he was suggesting I change the margins within the word-processing program for every single document I printed! He said that's just how this printer is and that the one he had on his end printed off center as well, albeit not as drastically. Apparently the print head is stuck in there a certain way and there's no way to recalibrate it. Overall, he gave the impression that he thought I was unrealistic and overdemanding to expect this printer to center the print job on the page. He did admit, however, that he had received other calls on this issue.

Well, I was pretty steamed about this at first, but when I cooled off I decided to give the 1740 another chance. The price was so good! So we drove significantly out of our way to another version of the company where we got the first one (the original store was out of stock). Got home, set it up, turned it on. It started warming up, kept warming up, kept warming up, and after a while it started to smell kind of hot and dangerous, and still it kept warming up...

Our first 1740 had a loud warm-up period of about 10 seconds or so. This one never printed one page due to its apparently permanent warm-up phase. Fearing it might explode, and considering that this might possibly be a sign that the 1740 was not the printer for us, I boxed the second one up and exchanged it for the HP LaserJet 1012.

The 1012 has worked perfectly from page one, has no obnoxious warm-up noise, and, aside from a rather strange software setup, has given us exactly zero problems to date. The printer it replaced was an HP 5L, which worked great for over 10 years with very few and minor problems. I should have known better than to let the allure of a low price cause me to ignore a product with a proven record.

This was my first Samsung product and so far I am not impressed, not just with the quality of the product but also with the peculiar attitude of at least one of their CS reps. Will I buy Samsung in the future? I haven't decided, but right now it doesn't look good.

I've had this printer for about 2 weeks and have never once felt that I made a bad choice picking it up. I bought it locally and after rebate was a near steal. Even before the rebate there's only a handful of similar products at its price level but after the rebate it was stand alone.

At this price I was worried that the durability might be lacking but it seems well made. There are no loose joints, no over or under bites on any of the casing, and no rattling loose parts.

Once I got it up and running (which took maybe 5 minutes from out of the box to first page printed) I played around with some of the settings. One of the things I am glad it offers is the "toner save" feature. I printed a few test sheets of both graphics and text to see what difference it makes. The graphical pages looked slightly less dark. Side by side its a very faint but nonetheless noticeable difference. With text printing, I couldn't tell. There is also a setting to change the DPI (dots per inch). The options are 600 or 300. There was a much bigger difference printing at 300 dpi vs. 600 dpi than there was going from regular mode to toner save mode.

I am very happy with the quality of the prints. Text is as sharp as you could want... graphics look fine as far as laser printers go but I don't think the resolution is as high as some of the high DPI inkjets. I printed out a few product manuals with graphics, diagrams, and text in PDF format and I have no gripes at all about the quality.

Printing time is very fast compared to both my inkjet at home and my laser printers at work. Speed wise, obviously this is far superior to my little inkjet, but I wasn't expecting this thing to hold its own against larger lasers. After a long time with no activity the first print causes a warm up to occur which lasts about 20 seconds. This is a whirring sound which is followed by the sound of paper being picked up. The actual printing time (per page) once warm up is complete is about 6-8 seconds. I think the program your printing from and the type of document make a difference of course but so far printing times have impressed me.

A few of the other features I like are:
1) There is a slot in the front of the machine where you can insert envelopes or card stock (greeting cards, 3x5 note cards, etc.) for printing.
2) If bending or creasing print media during printing is an issue you can send your output out a back door on the printer rather than have them get routed to the normal output tray. In other words, a straight print path vs a U-turn.
3) You can add watermarks and overlays to your documents via the print menu
4) Its energy star compliant... I appreciate that it goes to sleep and saves energy, especially since warm up time is almost insignificant
5) the printer status monitor is actually handy and isn't intrusive as some printer manufacturers make theirs.

Another review here mentioned the noise level. From what I've experienced with other printers, this one doesn't make any more noise than a typical laser printer. There is some unusual noise created by the paper exiting the machine but again, its hardly noteworthy.

The only item I would have for a wish list for future models is that the printer be able to be turned on and off by software. For instance, if I don't manually do it otherwise, my inkjet is powered on by a print request and powered off when I power off my computer. I wish all printers did that.

The bottom line is, this is a very nice little home office or personal laser printer. Time will tell if it holds up in the long run but in the meantime, I'll be comfortable using it.

It's noisy as heck while warming up, and I wouldn't call it quiet when it's printing. But it's pretty quick, has good text quality (print quality for graphics is only fair) and is inexpensive. You can frequently find rebates that drive the price down a little more.

I don't think I'd put it through heavy-duty use, but for a home office or small office, it should do the job pretty well. It also works with a parallel printer cable as well as a USB cable, which means I didn't have to replace the cable from my prehistoric inkjet printer when I upgraded to this little laser printer. That saved me from crawling around on the floor!

The manual comes only on CD-ROM; you might want to print out the important parts to keep handy. Installation was pretty straightforward on a machine running XP.

This printer was a real surprise - fast, economical ($115), and quiet in sleep mode (a bit louder that a more expensive laser when printing).
No problems at all setting up with the Samsung Driver with Mac OS 10.3.5
I highly recommend it as a printing solution on the Macintosh.