Samsung ML-3051ND review
Posted in Commentary on March 31st, 2008 by Sacha PeterI purchased this laser printer from NCIX for $185. The first thing I noticed on the receipt was the new $8 environmental disposal fee that gets charged in the province for all printer purchases.
That said, I had a few requirements for my printer: It had to be laser. I didn’t care about colour since I don’t intend on printing much photography or the likes. It also had to have duplex printing, and network capability was a bonus. For $185 (after taxes and the disposal fee, it came to be about $216), the price was very difficult to beat. The only comparables that came close was the Brother HL-5250DN ($50 more expensive, less toner capacity) or the Lexmark E250dn ($20 more expensive, less toner capacity). This wasn’t strictly a price decision, but the Samsung offering beat the rest of them on paper.
On the printer panel, there are a few buttons that allow you to navigate the printer panel, plus some distinctive buttons which tell you the state of duplex printing and the toner saver mode. I found this to be quite a nice feature of the printer – apparently the toner cartridge that comes with the printer is good for 4,000 pages, but with the toner saver option (and the lettering on the paper with the toner saver mode was quite adequate) it apparently is 5,600 pages. The toner that comes out of the box is a full toner set, not just a “starter” toner that comes with half capacity (for example – the Lexmark printer comes with a “1,500 page starter toner”, while if you buy a refill from the store, it is up to 3,500 pages).
In operation, the printer does not take long to warm up. The only caveat of this printer is that it is quite loud when operating. Otherwise it is perfect – duplex works wonderfully and I suspect I will be keeping this printer for a very long time. This is the second Samsung printer I’ve purchased – the old one (an ML-2250) I sold off strictly because I wanted something with built-in duplex printing. It performed excellently as well.
It’s amazing what $200 in the computer world purchases these days, especially when you compare it to the quality of printers available ten years ago at the price point – invariably you could buy a crappy inkjet printer with a 200 page capacity before you had to replace the cartridge for 40 bucks. This was back in the day when a good personal Hewlett Packard Laserjet printer (e.g. the 5L) would set you back $500.
I’d highly recommend the ML-3051ND for personal or small office use, especially at the price of $185 pre-tax.
I agree re: Samsung printers — I gave my old ML series to my folks and purchased a new one recently, although I had different requirements than you. They’re also my go-to for monitors, but they get a big fail for their finicky and unhardy cellphones.
I recently purchase a ~$220 monitor. It had
$12 environmental fee
$17 PST
$12 GST
= $41 in tax = ~18% tax.
Here are details on this new fee:
http://www.servitechcs.ca/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=12
It seems that this new tax is designed to set up a recycling program for these sorts of items.
I wrote about this earlier – August 1, 2007 – it also turns out my memory was faulty as the environmental fee was $8, not $6 as I said in the article (I corrected it). The $185 price was correct, however.
In general, this sort of pre-paid tax is the only way to get electronic crap out of storage and into centralized recycling facilities. I remember that an old, old, old inkjet printer of mine (HP Deskjet 680C) couldn’t even get $10 off of Craigslist, so I figured it was time for it to go. Also if there was a deposit associated with such items, they’d be easy target for thieves, so the program is fairly well structured.
But without a deposit why do you bother to recycle it rather than huck it in a dumpster? A whole lot less work…
Grumble grumble. :)
(I was referring to my own grumbling above.)
In small quantities people could do that. It’s probably easier.
In large quantities businesses can’t do that. So they take them to the recycling facility.
Just think of all the old Pentium 133 desktop machines some businesses may have in storage – it usually ended up costing them more to get rid of them than to just keep them there. Same thing for most other hardware. Ironically they don’t have to pay the recycling fee for those old machines.
Re: Raven,
I was wondering something similar. What percentage of people
a) Are aware that they can recycle?
b) Would recycle instead of tossing it in a large garbage bin, even though they don’t get any money?
c) Actually do recycle?
I remember the GVRD did a solid waste composition study back in 2004 (link is here: http://www.gvrd.bc.ca/recycling-and-garbage/pdfs/2004CompositionExecSummary.pdf) but I don’t think this is updated annually.
If I was to guess:
a) 30%
b) 60%
c) Ambiguous question but assuming you’re asking “how many people have computer waste to recycle?” I’d say 80%.
Again, however, this program is likely structured to large volume handlers.
Hmmm … If you were to take the first 2 numbers, .3 x .6 = 18%. It’s probably not fair to apply that universally, but if you did, and assuming a 1:1 purchase:stop using ratio, it would mean that people are paying about $60 to have 1 monitor recycled.
Tony, the problem is those stats I quoted aren’t weighted with volume – chances are there would be a significantly smaller number of users that would be driving most of the volume in the program, so I don’t think your argument flies.
That’s not to say what I said either is any more or less valid since I pulled those percentages out of my bodily orifice… :)
Sure, I’m just trying to figure out an estimate for the cost to recycle a monitor (or printer, or whatever). I’m guessing this is higher than the fee per monitor.
After figuring that out, the next question is what the cost is to not recycle.
Then, are the positive environmental effects of recycling worth the difference (or more)?
Well, it costs more to recycle electronic waste than the stuff you can get out of it. I know that there are certain components on printed circuit boards that can leach heavy metals (cadmium I believe is one) into landfills. I also know that CRT monitors have a lot of lead shielding in them.
I don’t know if you just dumped this crap in Cache Creek whether this actually causes any material damage or not compared to the energy/labour costs of recycling.
I do remember that the US ships a lot of electronic junk to China (at least 20 years ago) when computer hardware contained a lot more gold than it does today.
This is all anecdotal, so yes, it would be interesting to see this fully costed out. According to their annual reports, in 2005 they made $6.9 million on revenues of $62.2 million, and in 2006 they lost $0.2 million on revenues of $61.1 million.