Many of us don’t want anything very fancy from our printers, in fact for a lot of people color is not really necessary.  We’ve discovered that for a few pennies each we can get our digital photographs from our local supermarket or a machine in the shopping center.   So we start thinking about a cheap, fast laser printer – so is the Samsung ML1665 the solution to our minimal printing needs?

There’s no doubt that this Samsung is very cheap, in fact at the moment you can pick it up from Amazon for under £40.   Now that’s pretty incredible for even the most basic laser printer so what do you get for your money.

It’s quite a smart little printer, well it’s pretty much a small black box.  Obviously it takes up a little more room when you open the feeder and printer tray but not too much.

It weighs just over 4 kgs and to give you an idea it’s perfectly feasible to carry this around with a laptop – it’s a very portable printer although it’s not designed specifically so.

It’s pretty simple to use – there are only two buttons on the control panel.  One is obviously a power button and the other is a print screen button.  This is actually a pretty good idea, it just prints out whatever is on the screen of the computer connected to the printer.  If you want a page of text, a web page or some other information you can just maximise on the screen then press this button.

The paper feeder tray holds 150 sheets of paper, which is enough for a little printer like this.   It’s enough that you don’t have to keep refilling it all the time, if you are then you’d probably be better paying for a larger model.

There’s no doubt that the Samsung ML1865 is a neat little printer but what’s the print quality like ?

Well it’s surprisingly good, the text is well defined and the blacks sharp and readable.  The scales of grey are pretty distinct too, but this isn’t a printer for printing out graphics masterpieces.  Perfectly presentable output and the equal of some much more expensive ink jet printers I’ve seen.

It’s reasonably quick, Samsung says 16 pages per minute but I didn’t get anything like that, 9-10 pages per minute is more my experience.  However again it’s perfectly acceptable for a printer in this price bracket and quicker than the majority of ink jet printers.

As it’s only a black and white printer, the consumables situation is fairly straight forward.  The Samsung ML1865 takes a single toner cartridge with a capacity of 1500 pages (although obviously that is highly variable depending on what you print).

The cost might catch you unawares,  please don’t think that this is a cheap printer to run because it isn’t.  The replacement cartridge for the Samsung ML1865 is actually more expensive than the printer itself, certainly now it’s been discounted.   The cost is just under £50 currently although you can get the latest price on the Amazon web site –   Samsung ML1865 toner .

It’s always disconcerting when you find the replacement cartridge costs more than the printer itself but it’s very often the case nowadays.  This little printer although a solid performer and available at a very discounted price is not a great budget buy simply because of the running costs.  If you include the cost of paper – it’s going to cost around the 4p per page , which is actually on the expensive side.

If you’re going to be doing big print runs then this printer could cost you significantly more than some of it’s rivals. However if you just print occasionally it might not be an issue for you.

As far as refilling the toner cartridge goes it’s perfectly possible although those lovely people at Samsung have fitted the Samsung ML1865 cartridges with a killer chip to stop you refilling them.  It’s reasonably easy to replace though and available for £8 (plus VAT).  To refill the cartridge is quite simple though and you just need to undo some plastic rivets and fill directly from a bottle of replacement toner.

Just for information I’ve priced up the replacement costs from Toner Top Up for refilling this printer and it comes out as below

• Bottle of Replacement Toner (approx 2000 sheets at 5% coverage) – £7 plus VAT
• Replacement Killer Chip – £8 Plus VAT.

So you should be able to cut down the running costs of the ML1865 to under £20 a refill.  With normal use you should be able to refill the cartridge two or three times before needing a replacement £50 unit.

The costs were courtesy of Tonertopup who specialise in supplying refill kits for most major printers.