No Frills but you can't beat the price on this little speed demon

First of all let me say that I have delt with home printers and office printers for the last 18-19 years. Everything from the good 'ol 24 pin dot-matrix printer to the max capacity/feature office laser printers. Even though I had years of experience with other printers I never had one of my own until last year. I had held off on buying a printer since all that was affordable until recently were the inkjet printers. And as for the Inkjet printers, well, my list of complaints about the inkjet printers are:

1. All of the Inkjet printable machines that I have tried are way too slow for my tastes. Even when printing in black and white, they are very slow.

2. When you purchase an inkjet printer you are pretty much forced into buying a model with a color cartridge and whether you use it or not you are stuck with it either drying out from lack of use or dealing with all of the indicators that constantly remind you to replace the cartridge.

3. As mentioned above if you go any length of time without using either the black or color cartridges they dry out and you pretty much have to replace them. Even if you go cheap they still run about $25-$30 to refill the set and once again even if you are using them at maximum efficiency you are only good for about 200-300 prints.

4. A number of them do not come with the ink included so you are already out an additional $40-$50 to start out with.

Ultimately when it came to a printer I wanted something cost effective yet very simple and wouldn't take forever to print. I had held off for a number of years on purchasing my own printer since I didn't use one in the home very often and I could always find one to use when I really needed it. However, as of late there have been several things that I have been doing where I have wanted at least a machine that could print out black and white text. That and there are a number of discount coupons that I like to print out and take to the stores for various electronic items.

So enter Spring 2007 and me seriously looking for a cheap printer that will just do black and white and won't take forever doing it. I was in bestbuy and just kind of looking around when a sales associate asked me what I was looking for, I told him exactly what I wanted in a printer. He advised me that given my requirements that a Laser Printer would be my best option. I told him that I agreed that was what seemed to best fit my needs. He explained that since the laser jets used a toner cartridge that is powder based rather than ink based, you never run into an issue of having it dry out even if you don't use it. That really appealed to me but, I told him that all of the ones I had seen that were even close to my price range were very slow at printing and were still a little too expensive. He wasted no time and he immediately directed me to the Samsung ML-2510 which was on sale for $60. I couldn't believe my luck. I took a look at the toner cartridges for the model and they were pricey ($80-$90 range) but even with that incorporated it was still a bargain. What I didn't realize is that unlike many of the earlier model inkjet printers which required you to purchase the ink separaetly, this printer actually came with a toner cartridge included. So I was out the door at just over $63 with tax included and no mail in rebates hanging over my head.

As others have mentioned when I got it home it came with the power cord, user manual, the warranty and installation cd. As others have mentioned the one really thing that is really frustrating about this printer is that it doesn't include the mini-USB cable which is necessary to hook the printer up to the PC. Of all the things that you could choose to leave out in order to cut costs, I have no idea why you would pick that item. Fortunately I had purchased a Motorola Cable modem a couple of years earlier and it came with a mini-USB cable that I wasn't using. So I just used that cable and I was good to go.

Before I go any further once again let me cover the specs on my PC:

2.4GHZ P4 with 800MHZ FSB and 512KB cache
Abit IS7-M Motherboard
1GB Corsair DDR 400 PC3200 RAM
Windows XP Pro with SP2
Lite-On 160 DVD Burner
Pioneer DVR-111D DVD Burner
3.5" Floppy
USB 2.0

Now that I have all of the basics I shall continue. The installation of the software was a snap and everything auto-installed within a couple of minutes and just a couple of clicks on the mouse. A quick reboot and the printer was all set and ready to go. Probably the first thing that I noted about the printer was that for a laser-jet it is pretty noisy when it first fires up and while it is printing. However, any doubts I might have to the machine's performance were quickly laid to rest when after only a couple of seconds to warm up it immediately spat out page after page in rapid succession. When I purchased it I didn't realize that it printed at the amazing rate of 24-25 pages per minute. For those of you who are familiar with the inkjet printable machines, you know that you couldn't even dream of getting anywhere close to that kind of performance even when printing in monochrome and on the lowest possible setting. While I concur that the quality isn't razor sharp it is definitely legible and I would have no qualms about turning in a professional school or work report that was printed out on this machine. It prints in 1200x600 dpi for those of you interested in the actual specs. It is also very compact for a laser printer and even with the paper tray out it can easily fit on top of the box that it comes in. For convenience it also has the old style 36 pin printer connector for those who don't have USB2.0 on their PC. The tray capacity holds 250 regular letter size sheets. The printer has an 8MB buffer and the included Toner is estimated to be good for approximately 1000 copies. So even with the added toner costs it still doesn't cost you any more than a basic inkjet printable setup and at $63 it certainly ends up cheaper than all but the cheapest pieces of junk of Inkjet Printable Machines. While I haven't used this machine that much I have never had a single paper jam with it.

I haven't tried any of the other envelope, labels, transparency or card printing features simply because I have no use for them. So I really can't comment on how this printer does in those areas.

True this printer doesn't have color, a scanner or any of the bells and whistles but if you are a person such as myself and only wants the ability to print out typed documents and the occasional coupon it is the perfect solution for the money. Combine that with the price tag of just over $60 and it is impossible to pass it up. As mentioned by other reviews you can get lower priced toner cartridge replacements if you search around. Also for those who don't know it yet there is a tip for when your toner cartridge gets low. Pull out the cartridge and shake it around and let all of the powder settle near the bottom and you can squeeze a few extra prints out of it.