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The ML-4500's Box Contents

Taking a look at the specs, you can clearly see that this is a fairly low-volume printer, so it’s not really designed for use in a larger office. The life of the printer is rated at around 50,000 pages, so rated on a 5 year life the printer measures out to a monthly volume of around 2000 pages – not too shabby for the home or small office. The 4500 uses a micro-toner cartridge that should last up to 2500 pages in normal print mode, though the printer also has Toner Save Mode that reduces toner usage up to 30% while maintaining most of the quality of prints. Samsung doesn’t state how they rate the life of the toner, but we assume it’s a pretty standard 5-10% coverage of the page (so that’s mostly text plus some toner heavy graphics). A quick search on the net found the price of a toner cartridge to be around $55-65, and since the ML-4500 uses a single toner system (drum and toner in one package) the total cost per page is only 2.2-2.5 cents, which comes pretty darn close to more expensive printers and is a lot cheaper per page than an inkjet equivalent. If you print graphics heavy documents a lot, you’re obviously going to see a different cost per page (and also a lower number of pages per toner cartridge), but if you print a lot of graphics you may not go with a standard printer like the 4500 anyways.

The footprint of the printer is very small – it uses the popular stand-up design to take up the least amount of desk space as possible. The top loading sheet tray holds up to 150 sheets, while the output tray, also on the top of the printer, holds around 100 sheets. The printer supports all the standard sheet formats including A4, letter, legal, B5 and executive sizes. A multipurpose manual single sheet feeder allows you to use envelopes and non-standard formats. You can also choose to print to the output tray, or have the paper route straight through the front of the printer, if you prefer (as we do, to prevent too much paper curvature).

Quality and Speed

When we did a speed test using a mixed text and graphics document the printer managed to pull through with nearly 7 pages per minute, which is pretty close to the 8ppm rating that Samsung assigned. On a purely textual document we clocked 7.5 pages per minute, which is even more impressive. Even on graphics heavy pages, the printer managed a very nice 5.5 pages per minute.

For such a value priced model, the quality of text on this printer is astounding. Clarity and legibility of text is excellent down to a 6 point font (as low as you are likely to go in any situation), especially compared to inkjets and other printers in this price class, but I found the text a little lighter and thinner than I liked, even without turning on the Toner Save Mode. We were particularly pleased with the fact that a full page of 6 point Times Roman text was printed without any noticeable degradation in quality – sure the text was so small we had to get down close to read properly, but the characters were impressively crisp.

Graphics quality is passable, but doesn’t really do justice to the 600x600dpi rating. We printed out some photos with heavy use of halftones and the results were not as impressive as tests run using comparably rated print engines on more expensive printers. Dark blocks such as extra heavy fonts, and bar graphs were uniform, but lacked the ultra dark tone that makes these elements really stand out when printed on the very best printers. Obviously the print engine has a good class rating, but overall the graphics performance is average and I’ve seen many 600dpi printers that have far superior quality, though at a far higher price ;).

The ML-4500 clearly combines excellent text reproduction with fair quality graphics printing and extremely good pricing – both of the printer itself and the cost of printing. The only caveat we can really suggest here is to give it a test spin to see whether you think the text and graphics quality matches up with your expectations from a 600dpi printer, because as far as 600dpi printers go, the ML-4500 is only average in quality. However, with it’s extremely aggressive pricing, the 4500 will definitely have a place in the homes and small offices of those who need a simple, yet effective printer. Others with greater needs on a similar budget may just find that the newer ML-4600 from Samsung, featuring an upgraded 1200x600dpi engine, may suit their tastes better.

Overall Score: 82%

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