Samsung SCX-4824FN Laser Multifunction Printer Driver and Software

Laser-based multifunction printers are becoming increasingly popular because they enable copying and faxing as well as printing and scanning. One of Samsung’s latest releases is the Samsung SCX-4824FN, which is aimed at the SOHO market and includes some useful additional features.

With a curved and slightly chunky appearance, this multifunction device combines a mono laser printer with an A4 flatbed scanner and a 30-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF). Both the ADF feeder and the output tray are located near horizontal, so the sheet feeder adds little to the overall height of the machine.

There is a fairly large gap between the top of the laser printer section and the bottom of the control panel. However, this makes it easier to remove paper from the output tray. Although there is a small stitch extender and a fold-up paper stop, neither of these are needed for normal printing.

There’s a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the device, and a fairly large fold-down cover reveals a slot for specialty papers, but only one sheet at a time. A second 250-sheet tray is available as an option, but this raises the entire machine by approximately 80 mm.

The control panel spans the full width of the device and includes a 2-line x 16-digit mono LCD display, a diskette with menu navigation controls, and a numeric keypad for fax dialing. At the right end of the panel are large start and stop buttons, as well as an ID copy button that allows you to scan one side of an ID card, flip it over, and scan the second side before printing out both images from a single side of the paper.

The sockets on the back of the Samsung SCX-4824FN offer USB and Ethernet connections as well as sockets for a fax line and an optional handset. No wireless networking is planned. However, you can use a third-party wireless print server if Wi-Fi operation is important to you.

Hardware setup is fairly simple as the only consumable is a one-piece drum and toner cartridge. This slides in from the front once you have folded the front panel down. Installing the software is also easy, with just a driver and the SmarThru and Dr. utilities. Samsung printer must be installed. Windows 2000, XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.3 and later, and various versions of Linux are supported.

Samsung specs the Samsung SCX-4824FN at 24 pages per minute, but while it has a fair change in speed, we couldn’t get more than two-thirds of the speed in any test. Our five-page text print took 23 seconds, which is a speed of 13 pages per minute, and when we printed the longer 20-page print it took 1:13, which is still just 16.4 pages per minute. Text and graphics printing resulted in 9.38 pages per minute.

One reason for these comparatively slow speeds, which also accounts for the difference between Samsung’s claims and our test results, is that the printer takes a long time to warm up. Between 17 and 20 seconds before the paper moves, and it can be longer if the printer is asleep, as is often the case in a typical small or home office environment.

Black print quality is generally good, although this is certainly true for most mono laser printers and multifunction printers. There are very few devices that do not print more than enough text. However, graphic printing also works well for this device. It produces smooth and largely unbanded graphic areas, good variation in gray tone to represent different colors, and easy-to-read text overlays, even on darker grayscales.

This is also reflected in our photo printing, which offers surprisingly good reproduction for a mono laser. Copying the grayscale output from this computer is the only place where it disappoints, as the grayscale suddenly becomes very dark and it is difficult to read overlaid text. This also applies to straight scans, both from the flatbed and the ADF. Therefore, you may need to compensate for this by changing the settings in the scanning software you use.

There are two drum and toner cartridge capacities at 2,000 and 5,000 pages, although the starter cartridge that comes with the device yields a measly 700. Using the high yield, 5,000 page cartridges gives a page cost of 2.28p, including 0.7p for paper. This compares very well with other machines in a similar price range, which can cost up to 4p per page, even when using their best consumables.

Related Printer: Samsung SCX-4835FR

Verdict

The Samsung SCX-4824FN is a pretty good multifunction laser printer for general small office work. It produces good quality text, reasonable graphics and although the mono photocopies are a bit shaky, the scanning and fax functions are useful additions. It would be useful to have a USB input for storage drives, but the low running costs compensate for this to some extent.