Samsung ML-4050 Laser Printer Drivers and Software

If you want a laser printer for larger volume prints, that doesn’t mean it has to be much larger than smaller capacity machines. Take the Samsung ML-4050, for example, which has a maximum duty cycle of 200,000 pages per month and a top speed of 38 pages per minute (although both numbers should be taken into account). It is slightly larger than machines with half its capacity.

Light gray with dark gray side panels, the Samsung ML-4050 won’t violate many house style rules. it’s harmless and appropriately matter-of-fact. The traditional version feeds paper from a 500-sheet tray at the bottom. Yes, we said 500 sheets, so an extra brownie point for Samsung, and there’s a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray too. You can also add up to three additional 500-sheet trays, giving a massive total capacity of 2,100 sheets, enough for almost any workgroup and some departments.

The two-line LCD screen is backlit and positioned at a 30-degree angle for easy reading. It would be useful to put a status indicator at the top to make it easier to keep track of an office when paper is running out or there is a paper jam.

Samsung rates the ML-4050 at 38 pages per minute when printing on A4 paper, which is fast. Needless to say, we didn’t see these speeds under our testing regime. Our five-page text print took 19 seconds, a speed of 15.8 pages per minute, and the 20-page document returned 26.7 pages per minute. Our five-page text and graphics print yielded 13.6 pages per minute.

These speeds are all quite reasonable for this class of printers, although not as fast as we would have expected given the usual price drops from claimed to actual results.

Related Printer: Samsung ML-2160 Driver

The printer has a built-in duplexer and uses good interleaving technology to increase the speed of a two-sided print job. It takes two sheets at a time and interleaves printing the second page of one with the first page of the next. Printing our 20-page document as a 10-page duplex job took 1 minute and 6 seconds, a speed of 18.2 pages per minute.