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Samsung’s Xpress C1810W is a colour laser printer aimed at moderate use in a small office or workgroups. It can print up to 18 black or colour pages per minute (ppm), and supports wired and wireless networking. The only significant omission is automatic double-sided printing, but we wouldn’t necessarily expect it at this price.
Apart from a decent control panel with a two-line monochrome LCD display, there isn’t much to this printer’s appearance, but its 250-sheet cassette is topped by a flat deck serving as a single-sheet bypass. You need to withdraw the arrangement almost fully before you can pivot up the bypass tray and re-load the cassette, while the bypass itself isn’t as convenient as a simple slot in the front cover.
Administrators can monitor and configure the printer via its password-protected web interface
The C1810W supports Google Cloud Print, and mobile printing through AirPrint or via Samsung’s MobilePrint app. Here the printer’s NFC support serves as an easy way to pair it with a device that isn’t already on the office network. Like HP, Samsung now has a print service plug-in for Android, allowing printing directly from within apps which support it, rather than only using MobilePrint.
AirPrint is supported, and there’s a Mobile Print app (pictured) for Android
This printer isn’t too quick to start, with the first page of a mono print job taking 16 seconds to print from standby, and 25 seconds from sleep. It’s quicker from that point, though, printing at 15.5ppm in our 25 page letter test. Unusually in this price range, the C1810W isn’t much slower in colour, managing a good 13.6ppm over our complex graphical test. This printer produced cracking black text with razor-sharp edges, and exceptionally good colour graphics with a lovely, even sheen. The only blot was a blue bias in photographs.
Cheap laser printers usually let themselves down with unreasonable running costs, but that’s not exactly the case here. We worked out the cost of a full-colour page to be 11.4p, of which the black component is about 2.1p. Overall that’s a couple of pence cheaper than competitors such as the Xerox Phaser 6500N or Dell C2660DN, but still far more than an inkjet alternative.
If you must have a colour laser, this printer’s solid speed, great results and comparatively low running costs are enough to give it the edge over the competition, although the Xerox Phaser 6500N is the better choice if print quality is paramount.
