Customer Reviews

Samsung ML-2010 Mono Laser Printer

5 star:		(50)
4 star:		(36)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I have been a very satisfied user of a Samsung ML-1210 laser printer for several years. Samsung really had made a reputation for manufacturing top-quality inexpensive laser printers, and my ML-1210 was a prime example of Samsung's attention to design and usability. So when I urgently needed a new laser printer after a recent move, I could not wait until my ML-1210 arrived with the rest of my belongings, and bought an ML-2010 immediately. After all, it was a Samsung design and probably an improvement over my trusty ML-1210.

What a huge disappointment. When I go through the reviews here at Amazon, I noticed that the majority of people praise the printer for being inexpensive. These people obviously never used a previous generation Samsung laser printer, because there actually was a time when Samsung made quality inexpensive printers, and there actually were inexpensive Samsung printers that were excellent in every aspect. Unfortunately the ML-2010 is not one of these good Samsung printers.

I have to admit that the installation is much easier and Samsung has to be given credit for attention to Mac and Linux compatibility(Just use Samsung ML-1710 drivers for Linux). But this is about the only good feature of the ML-2010. In my opinion, its shortcomings are:

-NOISE. The reviewers who complain about the noise are right, folks. We're not exaggerating, this printer emits an incredible sound during the warm-up period, and a very noisy cooling fan keeps whining for minutes. In contrast, my ML-1210 was ultra quiet. Samsung engineers really dropped the ball here: I believe the addition of the noise cooling fan was due to the unnecessary push for the impressive 22ppm printing speed and the hot printing engine necessary for these speeds.
Dear Samsung marketers: In case you couldn't figure this out with your fancy MBAs from leading US and Korean universities, let me be the first to explain to you that the people who buy a sub-$100 laser printer DO NOT care for the 22ppm printing speed. They just want a quiet laser printer with high quality output. Which brings us to the second shortcoming:

-MEDIOCRE PRINTING QUALITY: What's up with the GRAY text? Even in the 1200dpi quality setting and darkness set to maximum, the output from this printer is fuzzy and gray. Something went horribly wrong during the design of this printer, and you can tell by the print quality.

-BAD DESIGN: I will not even dwell over the fact that the design is ugly: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and honestly a laser printer does not have to be a Le Corbusier masterpiece. But the poor design of the printer impacts usability: The printer literally spits out printed pages at the (unnecessarily high) speed of 22 pages per minute, and unless you deploy the ungainly paper retaining extension, the pages will not stay on the printer and will simply fall off, resulting in a mess of unordered pages. Why did Samsung have to change the design of the paper path? My ML-1210 could easily print a hundred pages and retain them on the printer, in order.

In short, the ML-2010 is not the well designed, inexpensive Samsung printer that the company was well known for making. Please do not reward Samsung by buying this poorly-designed printer. Samsung has proven that they could deliver excellent printers in the past, but the ML-2010 is a total failure. I recommend an HP printer or even a used ML-1210 instead of the ML-2010.

My wife prints her students' papers at home so it was time to dedicate a laser printer to the task. For our limited budget, this fits the bill quite nicely. Pros/Cons: It doesn't support USB 2.0 and the long warm up time is kind of frustrating ("Did I click print??? Oh yeah, there it goes.") Once it gets going, the pages come out quickly. It is louder than most other laser printers, but not louder than some ink jets. And yes, the room lights flicker when it fires up. No joke. Not worth the price without a rebate, and the price seems to be on the rise. Samsung has replaced this with a later model, and I can only hope that they'll support this one for a full lifecycle (although the cost of toner replacement rivals the purcahse price of the printer!). You can also get a Dell laser printer for around $99.

I recently received this printer from another store. Not sure if it was the shipping or something else, but I ended up spending half an hour cleaning the excess toner spilled out of the cartridge.

My previous Laser printer was a Lexmark e210. I had to replace it because it was printing badly due to whatever reason and the cost of a new cartridge was more than what I would pay for this Samsung.

Some have complained about light text. It helps if you set all the printers preferences to their dark settings. And in the advanced section, you can tell it to print all text in black which helps the most. I'm satisfied with it after changing those settings. It also is slightly noisier than my previous Lexmark e210 printer, but its only noisey while printing.

There IS banding when trying to print photos. I know its not a photo printer, but was hoping that it wouldn't do that (banding) considering it has 1200dpi print. That is a negative for me, and after checking some online reviews, they have stated the same thing. I also can't tell any difference between 1200dpi and the 600dpi setting, but maybe its just me.

The price of this printer is cheap if you get it on sale with a rebate, that it almost makes up for the negatives. I will use my Canon IP4000 inkjet for the excellent quality stuff (photos and higher quality prints). HP probably still makes the best Laserjet printers, but you have to pay more for it.

I have read all the reviews and comparisons and settled on the low priced Samsung ML-2010. The product is easy to install and use. I was concerned about other comments suggesting the print quality was not dark enough. I can only compare this Samsung to the HP 1020 laser printers that I use at work and I feel the print quality of the Samsung is EXCELLENT! It is simple to switch from the toner save mode (lighter print) to standard (dark) print with the touch of a button. This machine is super fast. The machine emits a low noise level for apprx 5 minutes after the last page printed... I assume the machine is waiting during this time for the user to send other print jobs before going into a deep energy save mode. Once the 5 min is up the machine is silent until summoned once again. I took a close look at cost per page (toner costs)the Samsung beat most of its competitors--another plus. Machines that have a separate drum and toner (the drum will cost you dearly i.e. Brother printers) are deceiving in their consumption costs. Samsung thankfully uses a one peice toner/drum cartridge.

I bot this one at a deep discount, $50.

It has been used for a few days, very good in general.

I really like:
1. small size but quick and quite action. I get a 10 page print job done in less than 2 min. This is even faster than my office printer at >$500.
2. easy set up in XP. Not much effort to do it.
3. very good printing quality in terms of smoothness and sharpness. ( but a little grey, I mean, not that dark as an HP.)
4. No jams or whatever so far. Very smooth action.

I am not that happy:
1. No usb cord included. I happen to have a spare one handy.
2. The ink is not as black as HP. So I would not use it to print my most important doc.

At $50, I do think this is a perfect buy.

The printer is great for its price at printing on regular paper. The quality is good and it's pretty compact - excellent for college use.

Once I started feeding it envelopes though, it started choking. Using the manual feed takes forever if you have more than one envelope to print, because you'll need to press the "Cancel" button for each print (that lets it know that you're ready to manually feed). On the other hand, using the auto feed resulted in a ridiculous amount of jams. I estimate an envelope loss of 60-80%. Either subsequent attempts would also jam, or the next 1-2 envelopes would become unacceptably smeared with excess toner from the previous failed attempt.

I found a "hack" to improve reliability though. You can rest an envelope on the paper stop for the auto-feed so that it feeds at an angle. This dropped loss to about 10%. I should note these were the envelopes with the pre-stick seals.

And finally, the features are pretty minimal. It gets the job done, but as far as I could see, there was no print queue (which is especially handy to have if you're getting print failures), so you'll have to activate Window's print queue (if you're using Windows).

All in all, a great introductory laser.

I bought this printer a few months ago and it has been great. It prints really fast and the quality is pretty good. It is a little bit loud when it is printing. It isnt that big of a deal to me because it prints so fast. Once it finishes printing it is silent though. But if you are in an office or something and are printing things all day long I would probably not recomend this printer. I really like the toner save feature also. This printer is very economical and I would recomend it to anyone who wants to save money.

It works as well as would hope. For ~50 bucks after rebate, it's in the mid-low end inkjet range, but prints as good as a decent laser. what else is there to want?

things to know:

it's a little loud. when you print a document, a fan will turn on, and it will stay on for about 2-3 minutes after the document is printed. when the fan is on, it's definitely *loud*, think, a mini copy machine loud. not drive-you-crazy loud, but definitely annoying loud, esp since it stays on for awhile.

a new toner cartridge will cost you more than the printer (after rebate) practically, but that's okay, since it still comes out to ~2.5c a page, less if you use toner saver mode, then about 1.5c a page.

it does grayscales well, though i wouldn't use it to print out anything picture-like. but for googlemaps, it works great.

other than that, it's worked fine so far!

I found out about this winner @ Circuit City of all places. I was scanning the 'net there to find a matching price for a laser printer I was about to buy. After reading the reviews I decided that this was the one for me. Who can beat a 22 ppm laser printer @ $60 after rebates?! Circuit City could not match the price (it sold there for $99 matching J&R's price) because of its expenses as a storefront; it only matches other storefronts, so Amazon.com got my business. I ordered the printer on Sunday and it arrived on Tuesday. My ML-2010 replaces my HP Laser Jet 4, which was state of the art when I bought it back in '93. The ML-2010 takes up less than half the space and weighs about 70% less.

After changing one more time the ink cartridges of my girlfriend's printer and computing what I spent in the past 2 years, I decided to look at a laser printer. The reviews in amazon and cnet (although mixed) for this monochrome ML-2010 made me try it. So far, I am glad I did.

An interesting aspect is that the printer is one of the few that claims to work for Windows, Mac and Linux. This was of interest for me as I have a small network of Windows and Linux machines. The printer indeed does work on Linux (Suse), although I found one problem to overcome [...] I must warn you however not to count on Samsung support for Linux.

Regarding the many complaints here [...] about the "grey" printing (and I dismiss that this was due to the "save-toner feature"): I saw this happen when printing with simple editors, but not when you print a web page from your browser, or the typical word processing program (Windows or Linux equivalent): the printing was excellent in these cases (I did not study the "grey" cases in more detail).

Which is the real price of this printer? the initial toner lasts 1,000 pages, and the one you buy later will print 3,000 pages and costs like the printer. In summary: approx 160$ for 4,000 pages. Let's just hope that it is true.

After a perfect "printing week", I begin to think that this may indeed be an excellent choice for a home (or small office) laser printer (I will update the review if I find otherwise in the months ahead), if you don't need color. [Note added after 6 weeks of use: perfect performance, confirmed].

It is also interesting that Samsung is trying to offer products that work for Win-Mac-Linux. And, the day that Samsung support were to include just one competent person for linux, it would be perfect (and it would get 5 stars from me). But, even so, it is a good step forward.