By Matthew Klare
In a busy office, there’s no substitute for a good workgroup printer. Samsung’s ML-7300N is billed as a 21ppm, 1200dpi laser printer. Belying its low price of around $1,000, the 7300N features an automatic duplexer and a 500-sheet paper cassette.
We found the 7300N’s setup menu logical and easy to navigate via the top-mounted controls and LCD display.In a timed test, printing in default mode (600dpi) from Microsoft Word 2000, the 7300N kicked out the first page in 11.7 seconds. Including this delay, it achieved 18.5 pages per minute for a 30-page document.
The printer’s text quality in 600dpi and 1200dpi modes was excellent. Samsung’s smoothing algorithms, ‘Samsung Resolution Technology,’ delivered lovely, crisp, dark text.The 7300N also did a fine job printing from PowerPoint and Photoshop, producing smooth gray fills with some dither pattern at 600dpi, but nearly none at 1200dpi. It had some problems printing thin diagonal lines from CorelDraw, producing dashed lines, rather than solid ones.
Ethernet and parallel ports are standard. An RS-232 serial interface and an IrDA port are also available. Samsung bundles PCL 6 and PostScript III drivers with the printer. They also include ‘SyncThru’ network management software. SyncThru supports most Windows networking environments, NetWare 3.x and above, and Macintosh 7.0 and above, as well as various UNIX flavors.
All in all, the ML-7300N is a winner. If you need an inexpensive workgroup printer, this is a deal that’s hard to refuse.
Samsung ML-7300N
Rating: 93
Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics; 877-804-9949; www.samsungusa.com
Price: $1,250; Replacement toner: $229
Requirements: 16MB of RAM; 100 MHz processor; Windows 95/98/Me/NT 4.0; DOS IEEE 1 284 parallel interface; Ethernet 10/100 Bast T network card
Pros: Fast; inexpensive; automatic duplexer
Cons: Problems printing very thin diagonal lines