Samsung ML-3710ND Laser Printer Drivers and Software

The Samsung ML-3710ND is a no-nonsense monochrome laser printer that can be easily shared between different computers thanks to its Ethernet port. Essentially, it’s a faster version of the ML-3310ND that we recently looked at. You can buy it online for around £200.

Quite an Eyesore

Like many laser printers, this model isn’t exactly a joy to use. The two-tone, gray exterior looks very businesslike. Samsung has added a ribbed pattern on the front and sides, but overall it’s not an inspiring design.

The control panel is located at the top right of the printer and consists of a two-line, 16-character monochrome display with a circular control panel below. There is also a special eco button as well as a stop button and the on/off button. There is an error LED under the power button that blinks to indicate problems such as an empty paper tray or low toner.

The main paper tray is located at the bottom of the printer and can hold up to 250 sheets at a time, which is pretty generous. Above this is a fold-down multi-purpose tray that can hold an additional 50 sheets of paper, although it’s more commonly used for printing envelopes and the like. There is also the option to add an additional tray with an additional 520 sheet capacity if your printing needs are particularly demanding.

The Samsung ML-3710ND can be connected to your computer via USB or its Ethernet port. Unfortunately, Wi-Fi is not supported.

The printer comes with a pre-installed cartridge, so very few settings are required. Basically, you just take the printer out of the box, insert some paper into the tray, install the drivers on your PC and start printing.

The Eco button on the front acts as a switch to turn on and off a number of different eco-friendly settings that you can configure via the control panel. For example, you can tell the printer to always print in duplex mode, print two pages per sheet, or turn on toner save mode. The driver also gives you a handy indication of the amount of paper, electricity and CO2 you save through the different options you choose.

There is 128 MB of RAM on board as standard. This can be expanded to 384 MB if required. The benefit of adding more RAM is that it allows the printer to process pages more quickly before actually printing them. This can significantly reduce the time it takes to complete print jobs.

Super Fast Prints

Even with the basic amount of RAM, this is a fast printer. For example, it pumped out our ten-page black-and-white text document in just 30 seconds, and it took just 31 seconds to create ten pages of our black-and-white graphics document. Printing our ten-page presentation was even faster, at a lightning-fast 29 seconds. However, duplex mode isn’t as fast – it took 50 seconds to create five double-sided pages of text.

Despite the generally fast printing speed, the quality of the output is not affected. The press has an effective resolution of 1,200 dpi and the text is well drawn, extremely sharp and very clean. It also looks heavy without appearing artificially darkened. Similarly, our graphics test sheet showed smooth shading on the gray bars, with no sign of banding that can creep into the output of some laser printers. Even grayscale renderings of photos retained many subtle details.

There are three options to choose from when replacing the toner cartridge, each offering a different capacity: 2,000, 5,000, or 10,000 pages. Using the lowest capacity option the printing cost is 3.25p per page. The medium option costs 2.37p per page, while the high capacity version costs 1.96p per page. All of these figures include 0.7p for paper costs. With the two higher capacity cartridges, printing costs are quite low, even by laser standards.

Related Printer: Samsung ML-2166 Driver

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a printer that pumps out high-quality black and white pages quickly and with low running costs, the Samsung ML-3710ND is a good choice. It’s not a looker, but its compact size means it doesn’t take up too much space.