Samsung ML-2850 Laser Printer Drivers and Software

The Samsung ML-2850 isn’t the cheapest home and small office monochrome laser on the planet, but it may be the best bargain. It showed strength after strength in my testing, with no unpleasant surprises to steal any thunder from the strengths.

Even the worst features, especially graphics and photo quality, are easily beaten for this category. The best features—text quality, speed, and paper handling—leave performance in the dust. With all of this, the Samsung ML-2850 easily earns an Editors’ Choice for monochrome laser printers for home and small offices.

Like most printers suitable for both personal use and small offices, the Samsung ML-2850 is small enough to share space and light enough for one person to move. It measures 8.3 x 14.3 x 14.5 inches (HWD) and weighs just 19.4 pounds.

Samsung rates the Samsung ML-2850’s motor at an impressive 30 pages per minute (ppm). More importantly, the printer delivers the appropriate speed for the evaluation. I set it to a total of 6 minutes and 35 seconds in our business application suite, an impressively fast speed for a printer at this price.

The printer’s text quality is as impressive as its speed. More than half of the fonts in our test suite were rated as easy to read and well-formed on 5 points, with some exceeding both thresholds on 4 points. A highly stylized font with thick strokes required 20 points to pass both tests, but no other font required more than 8 points. Unless you require unusually small fonts, the printer should be able to handle any text you print with crisp, professional-looking output.

As already mentioned, graphics and photo quality are typical of a black and white laser. This results in a graphics output that is easily suitable for all internal business needs, but falls short of the requirements you might want to pass on to an important client if you want to develop a sense of professionalism. The two most annoying issues I saw in the output were banding and visible dithering in the form of repeating patterns.

Photos were good enough to print web pages with photos. They were also usable for customer newsletters and the like, but again a little too short to be happy with if you were trying to convey a sense of professionalism.

The above-average paper handling of the Samsung ML-2850 is very worth mentioning. The standard input is 250 sheets, which is enough for most personal use and even most small offices.

Even better, it is complemented by a 1-sheet manual feeder, so you can print on an envelope or special paper without having to replace the paper in the tray. A built-in duplexer for printing on both sides of a page is also standard. For small offices that need more capacity, Samsung sells a 250-sheet tray for a total capacity of 500 sheets.

As icing on an already attractive cake, the Samsung ML-2850 has a surprisingly low cost per page (CPP). The typical CPP for low-cost monochrome lasers is around 3 cents or a little more. The running cost of the Samsung ML-2850 is just 2 cents per page, or a saving of 1.4 cents per page over the P1505. Given that the Samsung ML-2850 costs about $30 more than the P1505, you’ll only need to print about 2,140 pages before you’ve saved enough on printing to make up for the difference in initial cost. Every additional page you print means even more savings.

Related Printer: Samsung ML-2855 Driver

Given all that the Samsung ML-2850 offers—fast speed, high-quality text, better-than-average paper handling, and better-than-average cost per page—it’s an Editors’ Choice.