Samsung C460FW review

Other printers may let you print from a mobile devices, but Samsung's C460FW lets you use near-field communication (NFC) to make the process easier. The C460FW is a compact, colour laser-class MFP with wired and wireless networking support, a 40-page automatic document feeder (ADF), and a two-line monochrome display.

A couple of things immediately seem out of place for an MFP at this price. There's only one paper input tray, with a capacity of only 150 pages. This measly capacity means you'd have to refill it 133 times to meet the printer's theoretical maximum duty of 20,000 pages in a month. There's no manual feed and no duplex printing.

This is the first four-pass colour printer we've seen in a long time. In such printers there's a single drum rather than separate drums for each colour. This reduces consumables, but it means colour pages must pass the drum once each for black, cyan, magenta and yellow, reducing colour prints to about a quarter of the speed of mono. Here the drum is rated for 16,000 mono or 4,000 colour pages, while the toners are good for 1,500 pages (black) or 1,000 pages (cyan, magenta and yellow).

In medium or heavy use you'll clearly be changing consumables fairly often. Over three years of light use comprising a total of 2,400 mono and 1,200 colour pages, we calculate that the C460FW will cost £580 to buy and run (not including paper or electricity). Medium use of 18,000 mono and 9,000 colour pages would increase this figure to £1,916.

A decent scan interface, but it's not immediately obvious how to expand it to access the settings panel

With this in mind, the strengths of the C460FW seem less relevant. Its print quality was high, with beautifully crisp text, and scans were sharply focused up to its maximum optical resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi). Photocopies were a little gloomy at default settings, but were fairly quick. Scans were fast, too, and the MFP scanned an A4 document at 300dpi in 30 seconds. The print speeds we recorded were less impressive, though. Fourteen pages per minute (ppm) is uncompetitive for mono printing, as is the 3.8ppm colour print time.

Samsung's print driver opens with a simple set of presets covering most jobs

One good thing about the C460FW is its size, and its light use figures mean it could be a good personal MFP for a home office. However, we’d recommend the Kyocera FS-C2026MFP+ if you’ll be doing a lot of printing and can devote space to it.