Samsung Xpress SL-C1860FW Color Laser Multifunction Printer Driver and Software

Small office laser printers are facing increasing competition from their inkjet equivalents, especially when it comes to a color laser multifunction printer (MFP) like the Samsung Xpress SL-C1860FW. It’s reasonably priced, but with competing inkjet printers being so cheap to run, the C1860FW has to be special to be worth it.

It looks promising, with a huge color touchscreen for control as well as support for wired and wireless networks. There’s also NFC tap and print, which makes printing and scanning easier if you have a compatible phone or tablet. However, it’s a shame that Samsung hasn’t included automatic duplex (double-sided) printing.

The Samsung Xpress SL-C1860FW is larger than an inkjet MFP, and at 21kg you may need a hand to lift it. In the base is a 250-sheet cassette with an unusual double-decker arrangement for the single-sheet bypass feed. The cassette must be fully pulled out before you can store it. After this, you will no longer be able to see the paper alignment marks embossed into the base plate.

In use, this wasn’t the quietest device, causing a particularly annoying clacking noise each time a new sheet was removed from the input tray. After a few pages turned up with creased leading edges, we checked the inside of the printer for loose packing material. Although we didn’t find any, just looking seemed to fix the problem.

In our mixed-color test, the Samsung Xpress SL-C1860FW matched the Samsung C1810W, achieving a solid 13.6 pages per minute (ppm). We were surprised that it wasn’t as fast in mono, pausing twice during our first test, then once when we repeated it for a best time of 13.5ppm.

The same thing happened in our 10-page photocopy test, which lasted 48 seconds in color but just 63 in black. However, breaks are not uncommon as brand new printers prepare themselves. Therefore, there is a good chance that the pauses will disappear with further use.

Related Printer: Samsung Xpress SL-C1810W Driver

Connected via Gigabit Ethernet, this MFP recorded one of the fastest scan times we measured. It took him eight seconds to scan an A4 page at 300 dots per inch (dpi) and just 13 seconds to take a photo at 1,200 dpi. The results were good. Print quality was also very high, with sharp text and bold graphics, although photos, even black-and-white photos, had the same blue bias that we noticed on the C1810W.