A little printing hero!!! (Samsung ML 1510)

Member Name: valve90210

Product:	Samsung ML 1510
Date:	01/12/08 (286 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well built, fast, quiet, compact, good quality printing

Disadvantages: Expensive for a new cartridge...instead refill it yourself!!!

When I was 11 years old and my brother was 13, we both sold our bikes, which we seldom used, in order to get money to buy ourselves a printer for our Acorn Electron. I was a Citizen Swift 9pin dot matrix printer, one of the best colour printers about at the time.

For many years it got used as our only printer, I seem to remember, it later got used attached to our Commodore Amigas to print out essays etc for school.

When I went to university, my Amiga was left at home and I didn't have a computer for much of the first year, meaning I had either hand write my essays, which was not good as my hand writing is terrible, or type them up in the over crowded university computer rooms and print them out on the university printers.

When my second year came, I got my first PC, and with it a Canon inkjet printer. It was great to be able to type essays at my leisure and print them as and when I wanted to. It was a decent printer and spat out pages of text nice and quickly, with relatively few problems. The only negative thing at the time was the fact that it seemed to use a lot of ink, and the cartridges were expensive to buy.

It wasn't until I had finished university and was hardly using the printer that I stumbled across the common flaw with inkjet printers (or at least the ones of the time), when not used frequently, the the nozzles on the ink cartridges dried up, rendering the cartridge either useless or rather messy when it came to doing some printing.

Having experienced laser printers at work and seeing how quickly they could churn out pages of text, I decided that I could do with a laser printer at home for the pieces of print that I did do.

Having done quite a bit of reading, I decided upon the Samsung ML1510, a small laser printer aimed at the home office and consumer market. Sized at about a foot across by a bit less high and slightly more that a foot long, it could be fitted into most home office spaces or into most desk areas at home, unlike the hugely bulky office type laser printers.

As with most laser printers, the paper is stored in a front loading paper tray (up to 250 sheets), which simply pulls out for filling and pushes back. The printed items come out at the top of the printer face down into a stacker so long documents can be easily printed without any problems of pages getting muddled up or ending up with the first page at the bottom of the pile and the last page on top.

The printing is done, as with all (as far as I know) laser printers, using toner powder, a very fine black powder with is stuck to the page using static then fuser to the paper using heat. The toner is stored in a big black cartridge (huge by comparison to those of most inkjet printers), which you never need to open up so they are nice and clean and no mess is involved when changing cartridges.

The best thing about laser printers is the huge amounts of pages they can print from one cartridge. Unlike most deskjets which seem to print a handful or pages before asking you to order more ink, you can print, literally, hundreads of pages from a single toner cartridge, and they don't suffer from drying up either, so they really are a great choice for users who have a lot of printing to do from time to time.

Having had this printer for a few years now, I can safely say that it has proved to be brilliant! From sitting in standby, it prints the first page you send in about 11 seconds, which whilst it may sound a long time, is actually pretty quick for a laser printer as they need to get to temperature etc. After that it spits out pages at a very impressive rate. Even the longest essay can be printed out in a matter of a minute or two. And whats more, the print quality is excellent, nice and clean and crisp!

Also, I have noticed that it very very seldom suffers from any kind of paper jams. Unlike the laser printers I have experienced in the work place which seemed to enjoy making you open them up and try to remove tiny scraps of a shredded sheet of A4.

Another difference is the amout of noise it makes, in my office at work, we have a laser printer which is forever humming away to itself, the Samsung only really makes any noise when it is called into action, apart from that it is pretty quiet.

In the last couple of years I have been working more and more on my own business and as such have had quite a lot more printing to be doing for invoices etc. This printer has proven to be invaluble for this as it is so quick to whizz off an invoice run and duplicate copies for my records.

The only downside to this printer, I eventually discovered when the toner cartridge which was supplied with the printer finally ran out of toner, to the point that the usual shaking the cartridge trick (anyone who has worked in an office, knows exactly what I mean) stopped helping. I looked up prices for a new cartridge and discovered that it was going to cost me about £45. I could hardly believe it, the whole printer had only cost me £65!!!

After a lot of research, I found out that the new toner cartridge would be a larger one than was originally supplied with the printer and as such would print even more pages, but even so, it was too expensive. A bit more research showed me that I could order bottles of toner powder and simply refill the existing cartridge, though it was recommended that you did this on one of the larger cartridges, not the one that came with the printer.I decided I would give it a try anyway.

I ordered the toner at a cost of.... £12 including delivery.

When it arrived, I followed the instructions, including putting down lots of paper to catch any spilt toner. Within about 10 minutes I had got a nicely full up toner cartridge again and my printer was working perfectly again. ANd what's more I still had enough toner left to refill it again (though so far I haven't had to do this....it really does print and amazing amount from a single cartridge!) There is the posibilty of making a real mess if you were to spill the toner as it is very finer and would get everywhere, ut with a little care this really shouldn't be a problem.


Although this printer has been superceeded by other models now, I would still very much recommend this printer and would say, if you are looking for a new printer (mono only, no colour) then you could do a lot worse than getting one of these, it is well built, small enough to fit almost anywhere, quiet enough to use at home and fast enough to print off anything you want nice and quickly. The only downside is the cost of replacement cartridges but even that isn't a major problem as a diy refill is very simple.

A great printer!

Summary: A great printer for the home/small office!

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