Samsung QL-7050/N Laser Printer Review - PAGE 1

Introduction

The QL-7050 Profile Shot

The interest in a high-speed printer for the home and small office has been steadily on the rise, as the old adage “time is money” has become increasingly reflective of our often hectic lives. This could also be an extension of our love of more power and more speed – our CPUs are already past the Ghz mark, now let’s concentrate on speeding up everything else. With that in mind, we took a look at Samsung’s QL7050 Laser Printer – their flagship printer with ultra high-speed 17ppm printing.

The brawn behind the Samsung QwikLaser 7050 series is an amazing 100Mhz Motorola PowerPC 603e RISC processor, a standard 12MB of memory (expandable to 128MB) and a highly capable 1200dpi class print engine with 17 ppm print speed and a quick 13 second first page output time (FPOT). The printer also has a whole slew of advanced features like 8ppm duplex printing, SRT (SAMSUNG Resolution Technology) and SGT (SAMSUNG Gray Technology) and PCL 5E, PCL 6, PS II emulation.

Make no mistake, the 7050 is an office class printer with optional Ethernet capabilities (standard on a 7050N). It has a 500 page paper cassette and 100 sheet multi-purpose support tray capable of handling 3"x 5" and legal size sheets. If that doesn’t satisfy you, you can add an optional 500 page cassette for a total of 1100 pages of capacity. It’s standard square printer form factor and 250 page output tray makes it ideal for high capacity print jobs. Add to that the 65,000 pages/month duty cycle, and a life cycle of 300,000, and you know this is definitely not just something you buy for your kids to print out their occasional classroom report.

Toner cartridges are rated for 8000 pages at 5% coverage. Since the toner retails for around $150 per cartridge on the net, the cost to print is around 1.9 cents per page (not including paper consumables). This puts the printer quite close to super high capacity printers beyond the scope of our discussion. Since the cost of printing is always cost of toner plus the cost of paper consumables, the Duplex mode (double sided printing) could save a LOT of money for high volume print jobs.

We were sent both a QL-7050 and a QL-7050N for testing, and found the network capabilities to be quite robust with support for Microsoft Windows (all flavours), SUN,Solaris, HP-UX, SCO, Novell Netware, and Mac. Network installations were quick and painless because, like the 6060S, the 7050N will auto-configure its network settings if a DHCP server is present. Setup in our office was very simple whether we used a Win2000 client or Win98 client on a peer to peer network. Network printing also invariably ended up being faster because the full document was dumped into the printer memory faster through the network than through the Parallel cable (there is no USB support in the models tested).

For our speed testing, we printed a 50 page PDF document with mixed text and illustrations, and several text only documents. We also printed several other reference test pages for quality comparisons. The 7050 managed to average just under 4 seconds per page, or around 15 pages per minute in our mixed page test. In text only documents it was marginally faster with 15.6 pages per minute. The first page output time was almost always 12 seconds, which is even faster than the stated specs.