Samsung Samsung CLP-660ND

The control panel is simple for the most part. You navigate menus on the two-line monochrome LCD using a brief array of clearly labeled buttons. Some of the messages displayed could resemble normal language more closely, but most are understandable. Samsung's SmartPanel Monitor application picks up the slack by providing on-screen status, troubleshooting, and other useful information.

The machine ships with standard-yield, 2500-page black and 2000-page cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges. The high-yield versions we priced are still a little expensive: A 5500-page black cartridge costs $110, or 2 cents per page, while each 5000-page color cartridge costs $130, or 2.6 cents per color, per page.

Though installing the printer started with one of those potentially daunting, wordless posters, the process went smoothly. The PDF user guide offers plenty of operational guidance but not much on the driver or software. When we tried using Samsung's own driver for the printer, it stalled on our Photoshop tests because of a mysteriously absent .dll file; we ended up testing it using the PostScript driver instead. At press time, Samsung said it had resolved the driver issue but had not confirmed a date for making the fix publicly available.

The better-than-average reliability mark that readers gave to Samsung printer products in our Reliability and Service survey buoys the ranking of an otherwise run-of-the mill printer. Its struggles with graphics quality, so if you buy it, you should probably stick to pie charts and other simple, ordinary image types.

--Melissa Riofrio