Samsung CLX-6210FX Cartridge Review

The Samsung CLX-6210FX color laser multifunction printer provides midrange options at an affordable price. The printing speed is pretty decent; however, the print quality looked a bit low with inconsistent monochrome and inaccurate color results.

The multifunction Samsung CLX-6219FX color laser is a big beast at 645.2mm. Despite such height, the complete input capability is still merely 350 sheets, which fed via a 250-sheet cassette and a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. However, there’s an option to fit an additional 250-page cartridge. The output tray will hold up to 170 sheets at the same time.

The Samsung CLX-6210FX color laser multifunction provides USB, Ethernet and RJ-11 fax connections on its side. Printing or scanning from USB flash drives can be carried out from a USB.2 port on the front of the device.

Out of the box, the Samsung CLX-6210FX equipped with 128mb of memory, which is upgradable up to 384mb. There is also an option to add an 80gb internal hard drive, which enables a stored Jobs feature that will allow you to save files to the printer.

The Samsung CLX-6210FX has a confusing control panel with a numeric keypad and speed dial buttons for the fax. There are also quite a few buttons to configure duplex and different copy settings. It could have been a lot better to access these features with a menu on the 2-line monochrome LCD screen rather than the extra buttons on the panel. You are likely to adapt to the panel’s style, but it could be simplified.

Four toner cartridges need to inserted before you can start printing. It’s somewhat frustrating that you have to wait for the machine to warm up (which could take a long time) before you can start printing. However, once it has warmed up, it prints pretty quickly. When printing, it doesn’t seem to matter on what quality setting you to use, it always took just over 28 seconds to print the first page of a document and then increased to 20 pages per minute.

Black and white text documents were clear and easy to read if a little pale. The Samsung CLX-6210FX’s “Print All Text to Darken” feature attempts to resolve this, but instead, it produced inconsistently bolded characters that often spoil documents. Luckily, this feature can readily be disabled.

The CLX-6210FX is supposed to make automatic adjustments to alignment in color documents, but the results were disappointingly inconsistent. However, we did manage to solve this problem by enabling the machine’s Colour Smart “Fine grain” feature. This dramatically reduced the alignment issues. Regrettably, despite having this issue fixed, color from the Samsung CLX-6210FX is largely oversaturated as well as inconsistent. The color quality will cater for smaller graphics; however, large blocks of the same color are affected.

Scanning can be done directly from the Samsung CLX-6210FX color laser multifunction, and results can quickly be sent to local and networked PCs.

The Samsung CLX-6210 color laser multifunction’s price tag, as well as features, are attractive, and its operating costs are certainly not too shabby either. Regrettably, it’s complicated to use and does not have the print quality we want from a laser printer, even at this price.