Verdict

Pros

• Flexible environmental settings
• High-speed Ethernet link
• Three cartridge capacities for good economy

Cons

• Not as quick as Samsung claims
• Duplex print is hesitant
• Dark grey finish can look tired

It’s not unusual for printer makers to have a series of similar printers, differentiated by simple attributes such as print speed. Samsung’s ML-3710ND small workgroup mono laser is similar to the ML-3310ND, but is faster. Both include an interesting Eco button.

Given the speed and environment the printer is intended for, it has a small, neat footprint. Decked out in two shades of grey, with ribbed side panels, the printer is extremely unobtrusive. The darker grey is perhaps not a wonderful choice for the navigation ring in the control panel, as it appears to have been heavily fingered, even when brand-new.

The rest of the controls consist of a 2-line by 16-character LCD display with no backlight, power and cancel job buttons and a third button, labelled Eco. This is designed to be a one-stop selector, which switches on several green functions at once.

Used in collaboration with an extra tab in the driver, the Eco button can control duplex print, multiple pages per sheet, blank page suppression and toner save. The driver includes a simulator which shows you how much CO₂, electricity and paper you are saving with the options you select – very helpful.

There’s a single, 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the front panel and an extra 50-sheet, multi-purpose tray that folds down from above this. A further 520-sheet tray is available as an option, giving a total capacity of 820 sheets.

The printer can be connected by USB or Gigabit Ethernet, though there’s no wireless option as standard. Driver support for Windows and OS X is provided and drivers are available for a wide range of Linux implementations.

The single drum and toner cartridge is an easy replacement from the front and is available in three capacities of 2000, 5000 and 10,000 ISO pages.

Samsung heralds a fast ‘first page’ time of eight seconds from Ready mode with the ML-3710ND. We wouldn’t dispute this, but there is the proviso that most printing isn’t done from Ready mode. With the default settings, the printer sleeps after just 60 seconds, so even in a busy office, most jobs will have to wake the machine first, which doubles the first page out time.

The company claims a top speed of 34ppm and while the printer certainly prints pages quickly, this figure is as usual a bit optimistic. Our 5-page text document returned a speed of 15.8ppm, though this increased to 25ppm on the 20-page long document. In case you’re wondering, our speed results include processing time but, for consistency, we always print from Ready mode, so we’re not timing printer warm-up.

The printer supports duplex as standard and our 20-page document printed on 10 sheets took 1:24, equivalent to a speed of 14.3 sides per minute. We would expect to see roughly half the single-sided speed, so this is a bit low. Watching the machine print, there are two obvious pauses in the duplex print cycle, where other printers manage a smoother paper transit.

Print quality for text is crisp and clean, the effective print resolution of 1200dpi giving a professional result. Even in toner save mode, characters are well formed and print just looks a little lighter than in normal mode.

Greyscale graphics are also clean, with no signs of banding and a good range of greys to simulate different colours. Even the test photo print, usually a struggle for a mono laser, came through well, though some detail was lost in the darker greys.

With three different toner capacities, you can select the consumable that best fits your budget. You get the best economy from the highest capacity cartridge, and using this 10,000 page consumable gives a cost per page of 2.1p, including 0.7p for paper. This is an impressively low figure and is only beaten by companies like Kyocera Mita, which specialise in low running costs.

Verdict

As a general office workhorse, the Samsung ML-3710ND ticks all the boxes. It prints fast, though not as quickly as the spec claims, produces good quality greyscales and excellent black text and is cheap to run. The flexible and versatile eco settings help to ensure a good balance between effective print and lower environmental costs.

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