Samsung CLX-3185FW

Good enough for home and small office

I saw this product at the office of my school. I could check the print out qualities.
The quality is good enough for small office and home. And I thought about the price of toners.
I think this has the lowest cost for ink toners. After that, I ordered this one for my personal using.
It is working well.

Wireless function does not work

This review covers two models: the color and the B&W (Samsung Monochrome Multifunction Laser Printer (SCX-4623FW) as they are both defective in the same way.

I originally bought Samsung Monochrome Multifunction Laser Printer (SCX-4623FW). Wireless function does not work properly. Very cumbersome installation process. Once installed it works fine. Then the printer falls asleep - by design, according to tech support. Does not wake up on print job being sent to it via wi-fi, you need to actually walk up to it to wake it up by pushing power button. Even that does not work consistently, because the printer forgets its own assigned IP. I fought with it for two weeks. Gave up and returned to the store. Exchanged it for Samsung Color Multifunction Printer (CLX-3185FW) in hopes that I was unlucky and got a lemon. Exact same story with wireless setup. Spent another two weeks struggling with it. Called tech support, spent half an hour and she was not able to help me with their standard scripted troubleshooting. Escalated me. Spent another over an hour, he failed as well. Promised that escalated Product Expert would call me next day at appointed time. Never got a call back.
Returned to the store and exchanged for an HP Officejet Pro 8500A Color Premium Wireless e-All-in-One. Initial installation/initiation is somewhat lengthy - about 25 minutes, but straithforward. Great prints, including from IPhone and android-based Samsung Infuse. Love it. Samsung lost credebility on printers for me. Still have great respect and use of my other Samsung products, including fridge and Infuse. The USB connection on Samsung printers worked just fine, but I needed only wireless for three laptops in the house.

Color me impressed

There are lots of capable AIO/MFP inkjets these days - but my wife and I wanted a laser. Most of our printing is text, and we'll hit mpix for photos. So why get a color laser? We struggled to justify the enormous price difference between B&W and color for most models.

Well, this printer is different. Since it's a single shared drum instead of one-drum-per-cartridge, color is 1/4 speed. If you need fast color print-outs, stop reading and look elsewhere.

For the rest of us who are casual about color output, this design is a BIG ADVANTAGE. It cuts down cost and complexity...not to mention footprint. It isn't a small printer, but it's the smallest color laser MFP I've come across.

This thing is seriously capable. I don't see it as a home printer trying to play in the business world - it's really more like having a business printer at home (without the size, noise, or eyesore). Sure, you have to futz with settings a bit, but once it's up and running...it just works. That makes it a steal in my book.

Here are some of my experiences with it:

|- B&W printing is fast.
|--- Forget stated PPM specs. It's fast enough that I doubt I'll ever get upgrade-itis based on print speed alone.
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|- WPS works like a charm, if your router supports it.
|--- If you don't think your router has it, be sure to check its web GUI. That's where the option was for me.
|--- If you have to setup manually, you need to start with USB and use a stand-alone setup program (on your PC) from Samsung.
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|- Once the printer is configured for network use, Samsung's driver software should automatically find it.
|--- Worked great for us on Win7 and OS X.
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|- I found that the embedded SyncThru web service on the printer is the easiest way to configure things (like SMTP).
|--- The web service lets you configure anything the front panel does. It's just way easier.
|--- The PC-side SyncThru software is very enterprise-oriented, and more for batch operations (configure 20 printers at once). I say skip it.
|--- I couldn't get the PC-side SyncThru to work anyway. It had SNMP errors, and I couldn't find a way to change SNMP settings on the printer.
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|- If you want to do things like Scan-to-email, you have to configure bits like SMTP first.
|--- You'll probably want to use your ISP's SMTP settings. It's just like setting up a local e-mail client (such as Outlook).
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|- SmarThru is a simple one-stop program that puts all functionality in one place
|--- It lets you scan, for instance, then choose a bunch of different destinations without re-scanning. Pretty cool.
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|- OCR is pretty good (accessed via SmartThru)
|--- You can save as RTF, a few different Word options, some PDF options, etc.
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|- Note that scan operations done without a PC (such as scan-to-email) are limited to 300dpi. This is perfect for text.
|--- This is surely typical of small printers, due to internal memory. If you're scanning photos, use PC software.
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|- You can use TWAIN to scan to any PC that has the printer configured via the network.
|--- For WIA (and possibly also ICA), you need to connect to USB.
|--- By the way, apparently recent versions of Photoshop don't install TWAIN support by default. Not sure why.
|--- You can always use Samsung's scan manager or SmarThru to scan to TIFF, then load in your favorite editor.
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|- For awhile after you print something, the printer keeps itself warm. This means your lights may dim momentarily every few minutes.
|--- This process stops after awhile, when the printer goes to sleep.
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|- If your black printouts don't look as sharp as you think they should, be sure you're not printing in color. B&W prints perfect laser text.
|--- At least on OS X, the print driver defaults to color.
|--- There's an "optimize blacks" option when printing in color - I didn't try it.
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|- Color output is better than I expected, on plain-old paper. It's really nice, especially considering the lack of hassle.
|--- There's a slightly semi-gloss "sheen" to printed regions. It looks good on color output, and isn't a problem on text.
|--- Photo inkjets that are properly calibrated, using special-purpose paper, can blow this away. But you already knew that.

CLX-3185FW Multifunction Printer

I have had this printer for about month now and I found it very easy to setup although the Getting Started Guide leaves room for improvement. It took me about 20 minutes to get the printer setup and configured on my Windows 7 64bit work station and two other 32bit work stations using WiFi. I used the new setup found on the Samsung site and I have not had any issues at this point. This unit is used primarily as a WiFi unit and has had only one small glitch, the printer lost it's reference to windows and I was unable to print via WiFi which required me to turn the printer off and back on in order to regain the proper connection so I could print. This only happen once. With all of this said, so far so good and I am very satisfied with this printer. If I run into any other issues I will post an update.

Samsung laser printer

Works well, takes a bit of time to warm up, but print is extremely clear.
Need special paper to print pictures like photographs.

Average Overall, Good Value Depending on Need

I purchased this printer a few days ago, and while I ended up returning it, there were pro's and con's that may make it of value for a particular user segment of the market.

I had no problem installing on Windows 7 64-bit, and the drivers loaded smoothly. The print quality of the color laser is respectable, though slow to print in color. Black and white speed was what I would consider typical. The slower color print speed is part of the trade-off of a single drum unit, but for my own use, I did not mind.

Scanning/copy quality overall was decent. I have a use case where I wanted the unit to scan and save directly to a Windows share on a wireless network, which it handled well when it was connected. However, if the unit was powered off or I came back an hour or two later, it would lose the ability to see the network share unless I connected to the printer again from my computer. This was the first show stopper for me, but may not be for most.

The one issue that many may find, and was tough to dig out without hands-on use, was the way this unit handles power consumption. When idle, it hovers around 10watts of use, which is great. However, as this is a laser printer, it regularly needs to heat up the innards which is a major power draw. While Samsung states "average 350w power consumption", this is very much a stretch. Every minute or so, the unit's power draw spikes up to 850watts (~7amps) for a couple of seconds to the point that the lights flicker regularly, and this impacts any other electrical devices on the circuit (to the point a computer UPS will kick on to protect). This can cause unreasonable wear and tear on other electrical devices, and is inconsistent with most of modern laser printers that level off overall power consumption better. The only way around this is to put it on its own circuit, which for many may be a deal breaker for many. In comparison, an HP laser atypically runs much more evenly, as does the Brother (though the Brother's overall power consumption is much higher).

I wanted to like the unit, and it did have many nice features, but the major engineering short sightedness of not isolating power better with a larger capacitor set in the power supply shifted the cost of ownership from the unit itself to the necessity of hiring an electrician to run a new line. This on top of the power draw (HP AIO I tested some time ago was around 650w peak, Brother AIO I tested more recently was around 630w peak) should be well understood before purchase. The price reflects this design decision, but to be honest, I'd rather spend $20 more and get one that has this problem solved.

Given the price point, its not a bad deal, but only if you have the right environment to support the unit.

Paper jams

Every time I try to use the auto feed it jams up on the second page so I have to use the glass one sheet at a time.
What a pain
Would never recommend it to anyone

Great Printer easy setup.

I have had this printer for a couple weeks and finally got a chance install it today. Very easy setup although the Getting Started Guide is a joke. Took me about 30 minutes to get the printer setup and configured on my Windows 7 64bit and 32bit wired work stations. I used the out of the box CD to do the setup. Looks like there are some new ones on the Samsung site but since I have not had any issues so far I will stay with the production version. I will update in a few weeks once I get to put this through its paces. So far so good.

UPDATE: 5-29-11 I had a chance to put this All In One through its paces. I have 2 machines that I use one with Windows 7 32bit and one with Windows 7 64bit. They are both at SP1 level. I faxed from the All In One and from both PC, everything worked great. Next I tested the copy feature. Color was very good and Black and White was also very clear. Next I took it through the Scan Functions from both machines. I scanned to email using Outlook 2007 and 2010, it worked quickly without a flaw. I next scanned to image, same excellent results. Next I scanned to OCR, wow it was fast and accurate on Word 2007 and Word 2010. I am not sure what version of the software the previous reviewer was using but through my testing this software and Machine performed outstanding on both versions of Windows 7. At this point I am loving this Printer.

Warning No 64bit

First after the first 100 pages sent to the unit the printer started sending out the Cyan toner low.
Then we found out that all the scanning features are not 64bit compliant. It works great for 32bit but not 64. Samsung support confirmed that there is a problem with the drives and 64bit and said to watch for an update. We were told this in May of 2011, the last version of the driver was April 2010. If the company hasn't corrected the problem in over a year do you really think they're working on a correction?