anyone have one of those Samsung ML-1740 laser printers that are always on sale?

[Kaido]

wondering if they're any good or not.

 

[Spike]

They are among the most common cheaper laser printers on sale. One of my good friends has one and loves it. He prints about 50ish sheets a month so he is not really pushing it but for his casual needs it was worth the price.

Other good and cheap lasers that go on sale are the minolta pagepro's (not sure the number) and the brother HL-1440 and HL-2XXX (not sure the number but it is the replacement for the 1440). I have the 1440 (got it for $70 AR) and find it to be a very good printer. My wife tends to print 200+ pages per month on it (still well below the rated monthly duty cycle) and we have had no problems yet.

Only thing to consider with the 1440 is that it comes with 2MB of ram so in order to print at the highest quality (1200) you need more ram. I bought a 32mb stick for $5 shipped to fix that

-spike

 

[qbek]

I have been using a Samsung ML-1710 for over a year now in my home computer (I believe ML-1740 is just a revised model).

I would say it's very reasonable for the price (I bought it for around $70 after MIR). The quality of print is good (although of course not as good as higher end laser printers). The toner cartridges seem to hold up as advertised (3000 copies per toner) so I think it's quite economical in use. I had no problems to install it under either WinXP or Linux - just pluged it in and it worked.

If you are in a market for a cheap laser printer I would definitely recommend it.

 

[Kaido]

I got my dad the Konica Minolta PagePro 1350w when it was on sale for $99. It's really good, but it's also noisy. I can get the Samsung ML-1740 for about $60 (it's $150 with a $60 Easy Rebate and I got one of those $30 off $150 coupons in the mail). Toner is pricey but I was reading on FW that you can buy refill kits for about $20 on ebay.

Two questions:
1. How loud is it?
2. Does it have that laser smell? The Konica fills the whole room with the smell of burnt toner or whatever it is.

My R200 stinks at text, plus black ink is pricey, and I like the Konica aside from the noise.

 

[NeoPTLD]

I just got mine. I paid $100 shipped. Noise level is somewhat louder than an inkjet, but not too bad. There is a fan inside which will give off a constant whine until the printer goes into sleep mode. Just with all other laser printer, this printer does give off a bit of photocopier smell.

When the toner runs out, I will have to figure out an economical supply for it though, since OEM cartridge costs about $80. The supplied cartridge yields 1,000 pages, replacement yields 3,000 pages.

One problem:
It seems to have a habit of spitting out a blank page when I print some sites from Mozilla. Even when I specify "print pages 1 to 2", some contents will result in a third page that is absolutely blank.

When I send exactly the same job to my Epson CX4600 inkjet, it doesn't do that.