Samsung SL-C460FW Xpress – Print Speeds

Samsung rates the speed of the SL-C460FW Xpress at 18ppm for mono and 4ppm for colour. The much lower colour speed is because it has a single drum and the page image is built up colour by colour before printing.

Under test, we saw a top mono print speed of 13.3ppm from our 20-page test, which is over three quarters of the claimed speed, though the 5-page document gave 7.5ppm. It takes 20s or more for the printer to start feeding the first sheet.

The text and colour graphics test gave 2.9ppm for our 5-page test, which is around the same proportion of the spec speed. This is really quite slow, compared with other colour lasers in the same price range and with inkjets, which can easily reach double this speed.

A 5-page copy from the ADF took a speedy 31 seconds and a 15 x 10cm photo took 38s from a PC. A Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphone, connected easily using NFC through a tap on the top of the printer’s ADF, beat that, at just 30s.

Samsung SL-C460FW Xpress – Print Quality and Costs

Black print quality from the 600dpi engine is clear and black, a little light by default, but adjustable. Colours are very bright and solid, ideal for business graphics fills, but not so good on photos, which come through a bit over-intense and seaside postcardy.

The scanner, with a matching 600ppi optical resolution, does a good job and copies are clean, though colour fills can have a slight colour-wash appearance.

As well as the toner cartridges, which are only available in one yield, there’s a developer unit and a toner waste bottle to include in the running costs. Working all the figures through with the best consumables figures we could find gives a mono page cost of 3.9p and a colour cost of 16.7p.

Neither of these are particularly economic, particularly when you compare them with something like the https://www.trustedreviews.com/canon-i-sensys-mf-8280cw_Printer_review Canon i-SENSYS MF-8280Cw, which costs £40 less and offers page costs of 3.1p and 13.0p respectively. That colour cost is over 3.5p less per page.

Should I buy a Samsung SL-C460FW Xpress?

This machines sits at a slightly unusual price-point. Mainstream office machines are likely to cost £400 or more and usually offer duplex print and sometimes duplex copy, too.

At the cheaper end, you can get similar feature sets for closer to £200, as from the Canon i-SENSYS MF-8280Cw, which also prints colour faster, at 6.1ppm, though black print is slower. That machine is quite a bit cheaper to run, too, if colour print makes up a good proportion of its workload.

Verdict

The Samsung SL-C460FW Xpress is best described as a good mono multifunction laser printer, with colour for occasional use. Both the speed and page cost of colour makes it an awkward machine to use for regular colour work. Against this, its handling of print from a variety of mobile devices via NFC makes it a very versatile machine in modern, multi-platform offices.