Samsung ML-3470ND Laser Printer Drivers and Software

Samsung has a full range of mono lasers, and the Samsung ML-3470ND definitely has the workgroup in its sights with its headline-grabbing 33ppm speed and built-in duplex printing. Still, it’s not a bulky printer, and its two-tone gray finish makes it easy to fit into a variety of office settings.

There’s a 250-sheet paper tray at the base, which is undersized if the device is really intended for a busy workgroup. You can purchase an optional second tray, but this has the same capacity as the first, so with the 100-sheet multi-purpose tray there is a maximum capacity of just 600 sheets.

The control panel to the right of the output tray is easy to use and well labeled. There is a 2-line, 16-character unlit LCD display, but because it is raised at an angle it is easy to read under most overhead lights.

There are two illuminated buttons on the control panel that you don’t normally find on a laser printer. The first is a duplex button that automatically prints all documents that come through on both sides of the paper. Where it’s quite normal to have a duplex function in the printer driver – there’s one on Samsung – it’s less common to have a button for it in the hardware – handy, though.

The second button is for Toner Save, another option that you can also enable through the driver. This is a unique Samsung feature and should not be confused with a draft print mode. When printing with Toner Save mode enabled, the text is lighter than normal, but is still fully formed and not jagged and dotted like most draft modes.

Samsung claims toner savings of up to 40 percent with Toner Save. So if you use most of your printing for internal consumption, you can leave the feature on and expect up to 14,000 pages from a high-yield cartridge, rather than the 10,000 pages estimated in normal mode.

On the back of the Samsung ML-3470ND there are sockets for USB, 10/100 Ethernet and legacy parallel connections and it comes with PCL and Postscript 3 in emulation. Drivers for Windows and OS X are provided and Linux is supported in Red Hat, Fedora, Mandrake and SuSE distributions, among others.

The one-piece drum and toner cartridge slide in from the front in seconds after you fold down the front panel, meaning the device requires very little maintenance.

The headline 33 ppm print speed is a bit optimistic, but this is a fast printer, and even our 5-page text print produced a speed of 15 ppm in just 20 seconds. The 20-page document increased the speed to 25.5 pages per minute, so you probably won’t have to wait long once the printer comes to life.

Since the Samsung ML-3470ND is likely to be in power-saving sleep mode when a job hits it, the speed at which it wakes up is a relevant factor. Here it takes about 12 seconds to start printing, so it may seem slower if your typical workload consists mostly of short jobs.

Duplex printing slows the machine to about half its single-sided speed, so the 20-page text test page printed on both sides of the paper took 1 minute 32 seconds – a speed of 13 pages per minute.

The quality of the prints the machine produces is generally pretty good. Text is well formed, although a bit light by default, but is smooth and easy to read. Grayscale business graphics are smoother than on some less expensive Samsung printers, although jitter patterns are fairly obvious. The gray area is good enough to reproduce colors well differentiated.

Our photo print showed reasonable detail, and the improved resolution of 1,200 dpi in the best print mode smooths the image, but also makes it a bit foggy compared to the pure 600 dpi version.

The drum and toner cartridge is available in two capacities: 4,000 and 10,000 pages. Using the 10,000 page consumable for better economy gives a cost per page of 2p, including 0.7p for paper.

Related Printer: Samsung ML-3300

Verdict

This fast, powerful printer can handle most printing tasks. The benefit of Samsung’s toner saver mode depends on the proportion of your printing load that can make use of it, but it can potentially provide significant savings in printing costs. It is important to emphasize that this is not a simple print draft and will be more than sufficient for many internal documents. The only minor annoyance with the printer is the relatively small capacity of its paper trays.