The Samsung ML1630 is a mono laser printer unlike any other currently on the market. Forget the usual grey or beige plastic box sitting as hidden as possible, the Samsung is all sleek gloss black and looks like a piece of high tech furniture. At just 122x332x375mm it's also probably the smallest laser printer you could find. As well as being extremely quiet it would look comfortable in any designer office or living space and has clearly been engineered with this purpose in mind.

As long as you bear in mind that this is no office workhorse it could satisfy your print demands. The quality of both text and grayscale images was above average and perfectly acceptable, large images with a lot of pale shades produced slight horizontal banding but otherwise images were produced to a good degree of accuracy.

It's not going to win any prizes in the speed stakes either at around 14ppm but this is certainly quick enough for personal use or in the home office environment and probably more importantly it can print a single page in just under 12 seconds. It comes with a single USB port so isn't designed for a heavy workload although Samsung claim an output target of 4,000 pages per month.

Print costs are around the average for a small mono laser printer at about 2p per page and replacement cartridges will last for about 2,000 pages and cost under £40, compatible cartridges are already available for about half this amount, reducing your print cost to a creditable 1p per page. The cartridge is a one-piece unit also containing

the photoconductor so no other consumables are required.

The printer ships with a low capacity starter cartridge which only has a 1,000 page capacity so you could find yourself in the market for a new toner sooner than you would like. Many manufacturers are now shipping printers with non-standard low capacity cartridges fitted and whilst this may be understandable in budget printers it is less so on more expensive offerings.

Paper handling is extremely limited and, annoyingly, the ML1630 doesn't have the ability to print envelopes. The actual paper tray is restricted to holding only 100 sheets of A4, so if you have a large print run, frequent filling is required.

Unfortunately other printer manufactures have more keenly priced machines that perform as well if not better than this Samsung, my current favorite in this price bracket is the HP 1022 which is now on sale at under £100. We recently purchased one of these for our own office and have been pleasantly surprised by not only the quality of the output but also by its economy, we have been using remanufactured cartridges and prints have been costing about 1p per copy and that’s about as cheap as it gets.

At a cost of approximately £125, the Samsung ML 1630 is asking you to pay a high premium for its looks, however if you are seeking a good quality laser printer where either size or outward appearance are the key factors, then despite its shortfalls this printer could be the answer.

Alan Wilson has over 10 years experience in the imaging industry and is currently a director of Cartridge Concept, supplier of all Samsung cartridges