Overview and specs
Samsung's C2670FW - an all-in-one office printer, copier, scanner, fax - is making a play to be the printer that everyone on your team can use. With an MSRP of $699.99 (about £445/AU$852), toner running $108.99 (about £69/AU$133) for black, and $101.99 (about £65/AU$124) each for Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta, this printer is targeted at media savvy teams looking for a single machine that solves a lot of problems.
Both fast and able to handle large jobs, its hefty 70-pound weight and 18.46" x 17.81" x 19.85" footprint has the model slightly smaller and lighter than the Sharp MX-C301W ($1395, £890/AU$1705). This Samsung solution also offers a dramatically more robust set of skills when compared to the similarly priced Brother HL-L9200CDWT, which was priced just a hair higher, at $700 (£445/AU$852), but only offered printing, with no scanning, fax, or copying.
Those copier, scanner, and fax functions are not only at the standards you've come to expect from a printer you're spending $700 on, but they're also accessible from Samsung's Mobile Print App. The model is much more suited for the small to mid-range team, and its 600 dpi output, an industry standard at this point, produces both rich photos and crisp text. It has two paper inputs, a main tray at the base of the machine, and an input tray for other media. It accepts paper up to the 8.5 by 14-inch legal format. Its front-loading input tray accepts paper up to 220 g/m2, allowing you to print beautiful photos on heavier glossy paper, as well as on labels, envelopes, and cardstock.
In this cold winter we're experiencing, I took my time with the printer to finally print a series of beach landscape photos I took at Far Rockaway and Jones Beach. The small details in the crashing waves were as detailed as I could have hoped from a multi-function printer, and the richness of the blue skies took me to a much more comfortable climate than what the east coast is currently experiencing. I also had great luck scanning and copying magazine covers in the photo copier. Again, with the photos this machine was printing, I could easily envision it being the workhorse machine for a small team printing out clear, rich images for a presentation board or book.
Specs and benefits
Having worked in a number of small business offices over the years, it takes a lot of quality features for me to see a printer as anything more than a necessity. More often than not, for those as low on the totem pole as I've been, the office printer is a persnickety beast of burden.
Thanks to Samsung's C2670FW - which is good enough for an office, but a tech support agent classified it as a consumer product - I won't always jump to dread upon seeing an office printer. The first thing I noticed in this regard was how simple it was to install toner. To pop a cartridge into the C2670FW, all you have to do is remove the orange and clear plastic case, and place the cartridge vertically into a slot. There's no need to rotate or lock in toner. This process is so simple even people that still use flip phones can do it without technical support.
Helping this printer stand out from its competition is its integration with Samsung's mobile offerings. While users with Android and iOS devices can use the Samsung Mobile Print app to access all of the unit's features over a Wi-Fi network, Samsung's Galaxy devices can communicate with the C2670FW through NFC, the same great technology that Apple is utilizing in its recent ApplePay purchasing feature. Although Samsung's is not the first iOS app, or mobile printing solution, they have created a very good interface. I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to use. I was easily able to choose between all of the different albums in my iPhone 6's photo library, and print either one or multiple images at a time.
Noise, almost always a damning problem with printers, is no issue here. After coming home late one night, I sent a job to the printer via the app on my phone, and that led to a quick and painless printout. Neither of my easy-to-wake roommates was awoken, so it's safe to say this machine will fit seamlessly into your office environment.
Flaws and final verdict
A week into my testing, though, I had difficulty getting the printer to print. I would either get blank printouts from the machine, or very faint ones. After calling Samsung customer support for businesses, I soon figured out that the problem came from the black toner cartridge not sitting correctly. Upon closer inspection, there seems to have been a missing or broken piece on my black toner cartridge. As you'll see here, the Cyan (blue) cartridge has a peg resting in the gap, while the gap on the left (where the black toner would go) is empty. This problem only came up in the last day of my testing, only lasted a couple of hours, and seems to be due to a defective toner cartridge.
When I was working with customer support, though, I was told that this model has had issues with the latest version of Apple OS X, 10.10 Yosemite, which is what I was currently running on one unit I tested the C2670FW with. This isn't the biggest deal, since most companies aren't as quick to dive into the latest OS as I am, but worthy of mentioning nonetheless. One other note, while the C2670FW bills itself as 27 pages per minute, I was only to get 24 pages of a simple black and white Word Document to print on 8.5 by 11-inch paper in a minute. Again, not a deal breaker, but something worth noting. With a more colorful word document, I almost got the exact same amount, with 23 pages of 8.5 by 11-inch paper in a minute. I was able to get the C2670FW to print 8 color photos on regular 8.5 by 11-inch paper in a minute, which is pretty speedy compared to similar models. On a glossier 120 g/m2 heavier stock of paper, that rate was cut to 4 color photos on 8.5 by 11-inch paper per minute.
Using the Samsung Mobile Print iOS application wasn't exactly perfect either. I found that trying to multi-task while printing led to jobs pausing or going into a digital limbo. This is likely a part of how iOS handles its memory when multi-tasking. Be warned that if you want to print a lot from the device, you can't jump around between apps. For instance, during a meeting when you're printing another copy of a file, you can't switch back to taking minutes for the meeting … or trying to beat level 204 in Candy Crush.
On the software side, the touch-screen panel on the front of the machine works well enough, but it's gear icon, used to expand options, is a little too small and hard to tap.
We liked
For the vast majority of the time I spent reviewing the printer, it worked like a dream. Images looked fantastic on it, from landscapes to still life photo, everything printed at or above expectations. The scanner is as fast and precise as any stand-alone unit, and the copier function worked both with the top loading tray, and the scanner pallett, much like a full-sized office copier unit.
We disliked
Unfortunately, the half a day spent trying to figure out what was going wrong woke me up from the dreamlike experience I had with the printer. That, along with the problems inherent from printing from iOS, disrupted my flawless experience.
Final verdict
The problems I encountered felt like rare irregularities, especially when considering how great the machine ran the rest of the time, as well as after I noticed the issue with the toner, which was able to be fixed by seating the black toner at the same angle as the other three. Since anybody who encountered such an issue could request a refund for a defective toner cartridge, the strengths of the unit outweigh this glitch, making it absolutely worthy of your purchase.
from TechRadar: Technology reviews http://ift.tt/13gTTNs
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