Samsung CLX-6210FX Printer Review

The Samsung CLX-6210FX colour laser multifunction printer offers regular options at a low price. The printing speed is pretty decent, however the print quality looked a bit low with inconsistent monochrome and inaccurate colour results.

At 645.2mm, the Samsung CLX-6210FX colour laser multifunction is a big beast. Despite such height, the overall input capability is still just 350 sheets which is fed via a 250-sheet cassette and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. However, there's an option to fit an additional 250-page cassette. The output tray can hold up to 170 sheets at the same time.

The Samsung CLX-6210FX colour laser multifunction provides USB, Ethernet and RJ-11 fax connections on its side. A second USB.2 port is located at the front of the CLX-6210FX which is handy for printing or scanning from USB flash drives.

Out of the box, the Samsung CLX-6210FX has 128mb of memory which is upgradable up to 384mb. An 80gb internal hard drive can also be added which enables a Stored Jobs feature giving you the ability to save files to the printer.

The Samsung CLX-6210FX has a confusing control panel with a numeric keypad and speed dial buttons for the fax. There are also numerous buttons to configure duplex and numerous copy settings. It could have been a lot better to access these features with a menu on the 2-line monochrome LCD screen rather than the extra buttons on the panel.. You are likely to adjust to the panel's format, but it could be made easier.

Before you get started you will have to insert the four Samsung CLX-6210FX printer cartridges. Before you can start printing, the Samsung CLX-6210FX needs to warm up, and this can take a frustratingly long time. Once it's warmed up though, its print speeds are decent. When printing it doesn't seem to matter on what quality setting you use, it always took just over 28 seconds to print the first page of a document and then increased to 20 pages per minute.

The result of the mono text document prints were accurate and readable but a bit under-saturated. The Samsung CLX-6210FX's "Print All Text to Darken" function tries to resolve this, but instead it produced inconsistently bolded characters that have a tendency to spoil documents. The good news is, this feature can easily be disabled.

There are still visible alignment issues in our colour documents despite the fact that the Samsung CLX-6210FX colour laser multifunction automatically adjusts colour registration in between printing tasks. We did manage to fix this issue, however, by enabling the multifunction's Colour Smart "Fine Grain" feature. The result was much reduced problems with alignment. Unfortunately, despite having this issue resolved, colour from the Samsung CLX-6210FX is basically oversaturated as well as inconsistent. The colour quality will suffice for smaller sized graphics, however large blocks of the same colour are affected.

Scanning can be done straight from the Samsung CLX-6210FX colour laser multifunction, and results can be sent to local along with networked PCs.

The Samsung CLX-6210 colour laser multifunction's price and features are attractive, and its running costs are not to shabby either. Regrettably, it's complicated to use and lacks the print quality we want from a laser printer, even at this price.

Samsung CLX-6210 printer toner cartridges are available here.