It is normal to be kaleidoscopic in the IT world. You won't even make the news without a drastic change. In such a world, the all-in-one printer market is creating news on a daily basis. The inkjet printers which used to dominate the market gave up its title to laser printers, and the laser printers in turn have started to lose ground to multifunctional machines such as the all-in-one printers.
Before we discuss the product, we need to quickly go over the whereabouts of Samsung's printer business. Samsung is leading the storm in the ever-changing printer market, being the most innovative and most likely candidate to play the role of dark horse. Samsung's revenue in the printer and all-in-one printer market is at a similar level to their strongest products, cell phones and semiconductors. Samsung broke the $2 billion mark in last year's revenue, enjoying large increases each year. It is also showing a lot of potential compared to the semiconductor business which is troubled by anticompetitive charges and cell phone business having to fight off Chinese imitation products.
They are off to a good start, gaining much attention in international exhibitions. Being rewarded the "2007 CES Revolution" award with its world's smallest laser all-in-one printer, they introduced the world's smallest and lightest laser all-in-one printer last March at the CeBit 2007 in Hanover, Germany in style. Moving with market trend's shift, they are looking to dominate the world's printer market with the color laser all-in-one printers. You will be able to understand the product better with this background.
I mentioned to a friend that I was reviewing a color laser all-in-one printer, and he noted that it must be troublesome to have to travel to take pictures and review the product. I told him that I received it through quick delivery and am using it now, to which he asked curiously, do you not mean color-laser printer? I reassured him that I am indeed using an all-in-one printer on my desk. He enviously said that his all-in-one printer would break his desk, if placed on top. Until recently, machines with comparable capabilities to the CLX-3160FN were described as "massive" rather than "big."
All-in-one printers tend to have messy input sections, making it tough for users, as it needs to have buttons for its color printing, color photocopying, color scanning and faxing. The reason why CLX-3160FN's input section looks so tidy is because the machine takes care of most of the complicated settings on its own. This "auto-solving" begins from the setting up stage of the product. The input-output cables are all found together in the back side with the emergency tray located on the bottom parts. Small details such as allowing users to easily remove toners by creating finger space shows how user friendly this product is.
Opening the box, placing the product, connecting it to an outlet and connecting the cable for the fax machine is all very easy. If you need to use the CLX-3160FN as a community printer at the office, all you need is minor changes to the settings through the internal Ethernet 10/100 Base TX interface, and there is an
easy to use smart panel program that allows you to troubleshoot various problems without a computer or printer expert among your staff. You can control the general status of the printer such as print settings, drive settings and toner information through the smart panel program.
Once you are done with setup, all you need to do is shake the toner cases, insert into the printer mainframe and fill up the paper tray. If you have a print job that requires a lot of paper, you just fill up paper in the automatic paper provider device at the bottom side of the printer.
We first experimented with black and white printing and color printing. What we noticed foremost was how quiet it was. The noise measured at 49dB, which is much quieter than the 50-60dB of an average office. This is in part thanks to Samsung's NO-NOIS™ technology. Those who are running small businesses or home offices will enjoy the space efficient and quiet CLX-3160FN.
Without many products offering high speed and resolution, the 2400dpi resolution is quite impressive, and being able to control most functions through a monitor is convenient. It has many useful functions such as a divided photocopying function where you record both sides of the ID on the printer's memory and then printing it on one page, a poster photocopying function which divides large posters for printing and clone photocopying function which divides one image into many images and prints it in one go.
One such function can be accessed through PictBridge. If you use a digital camera, camcorder, cell phone or an external hard drive, you can print saved images without going through a PC. More and more brands are supporting PictBridge in their products, and we expect the comfort level and its common usage to increase. You can also use the USB port to print directly files in the USB memory or save scanned data.
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