By Edvarcl Heng, CNET Asia
31/08/2007
URL: http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/printers/0,39051182,62031654,00.htm

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA—In a showcase to selected Asia media, Samsung introduced a new range of printers targeted for a September 2007 worldwide announcement at IFA 2007.

The new series includes the CLP-350N, an upgrade to the previous CLP-300 color laser printer. But what was undoubtedly the stars of the show were two members of a new luxury laser printer series, the mono ML-1630 and the SCX-4500 AIO.

     

For more details on the printers, click on the image.

Finished with a glossy piano-black veneer and styled with clean straight lines, the new printers also feature the same blue-illuminated soft-touch controls common to Samsung's design-oriented TVs and MP3 players. In a press release statement, Ng Long Shyang, vice president for Telecoms and IT Sales and Marketing, expressed his hopes that the new printers would be viewed as premium products to match the lifestyles of high-end consumers and SOHO users.

Designer chic

"The world is wild about fine design," said Mr Junwon Bae, senior designer of Samsung’s Digital Printing Division in a press statement. "In a world where consumers are looking for more than product functionality, Samsung has introduced an innovative product design and functionality that will further cement its position in the high-end printer market."

Though Samsung is admittedly carving out a new printer category all to itself, the fact that the printer market is generally perceived as one where cost savings and printing efficiency are valued over design raises concerns on how the two inkboxes will be received by the buying public.

But pretty printers have not been the domain of Samsung alone. Early this year, Canon released the Pixma MP145 which the Japanese manufacturer pitched as a chic and cheap companion to an Apple Mac desktop computer. HP has its own line of cute Photosmart portable photo printers.

Tradeoffs

Beyond the aesthetics, it should be noted that the ML-1630 and the SCX-4500 are monochrome printers, not color. Despite that, the print speed for both is just an average 16ppm. And in keeping with its slim profile, the SCX-4500 AIO has no duplex feed. So offices with a heavy reliance on that feature should beware.

When queried on the reason for the barebones functionality of the two designer printers instead of including at least a color printing option, Young Charles Kim, senior vice president of Samsung's Printing R&D Team, explained that based on current technologies a color printer version of the SCX-4500 will be twice as thick. It would thus not be able to present the same aesthetic slimness.