Product Review: Samsung Xpress C430W Wireless Color Laser Printer

 

I got this after my color inkjet printer died. It has an easy setup. You can either connect it directly to your Wi-Fi using the WPS button on your router, or you can use the installation CD. There is also an app available that you can use to monitor the toner level. It comes with smaller toner cartridges to start with, and the replacements are pricey (about $30 to $60 depending on the color). The good thing is that they are all separate so you can replace a cartridge when it runs out of toner without having to buy them all at once, and they last a long time. Since I purchased this in 2018 I have only had to replace the cartridges one time (at different times) with light to moderate use. It is usually more cost-effective, however, to buy the toner cartridges in a pack than it is to get them one by one. The app allows you to connect to your Amazon account and automatically order replacement cartridges when they get low. 

My only complaint is that this drops off Wi-Fi a lot. More than any other wireless printer I have ever had. And, it can be a gigantic pain in the ass to get it reconnected. Sometimes it is as easy as just unplugging it and plugging it back in. Other times, you have to redo the entire initial setup to get it reconnected. If not for the life of the toner and the fact that it has good print quality I would have found something else, but given that the Wi-Fi issue is more irritating than anything else, I live with it.. 

Product Review: Epson Stylus CX4450 All-in-One Color Printer-Scanner

 

As a printer, this thing is pretty much useless. It goes through ink very fast, and when one of the colors goes out, it will not compensate with the other colors or print black only. Even if you only print in black and white it still goes through ink fast. The ink cartridges are a lot more expensive to replace than they are worth, and it is not like this does any better job printing photo quality than any other inkjet printer. 

It is however a good, and easy-to-use flatbed scanner. I only paid about $30 for it, and I really only use the scanner now. At that price it would be worth it, but certainly not for $300, or anywhere near that. You can get a flatbed scanner for far less than that, and there are far better multifunction printers out there.

Product Review: Samsung ML-2010 Laser Printer

 

I bought this printer for around $50-$60 years ago. It is most definitely NOT worth the $460 it is currently (as of August 2023) selling for on Amazon. It is still running, and I have never had any major issues with it, but there are some very irritating things about it. First, it loses connection to Wi-Fi a lot, and it can be a huge pain in the ass to get it reconnected. Sometimes, all you have to do to reconnect it is just unplug it and plug it back in, and other times you have to go through the Samsung utilities and fight with it for about 20 minutes to get it reconnected.

. It is definitely a get-what-you-pay-for kind of printer. It is not the fastest thing ever, and does make a lot of noise when printing (for those of you who care about that). And, it does jam every so often, usually on bigger print jobs. When it does jam it can be a pain in the ass to get the stuck papers out. On the other hand, the toner does last a long time, and if you are mainly printing word processing or text documents you will get a lot of mileage from one toner cartridge. It is not good for graphics-heavy documents. For example, I would use it to print off my physics teacher's lecture notes which he put online as PDF files. Some of the graphics printed off OK and you could actually see the pictures. Other times you would just get this dark blob where a picture or boxed-off equation was.

If you are looking for something that will give you high-quality print jobs, this is not it. But if you are looking for something to print a bunch of papers or text documents on, this is good if you can find it at the right price.