PRINTING. The Samsung Xpress C460FW prints using laser technology, which picks up powdered 'toner' on a roller and fuses it to the paper with heat. Its text quality is excellent, as we've come to expect from a laser printer. Text printing was very quick, 11.5 pages per minute, costing 2.9 cents per page. Its color graphics printing is very good for reports, newsletters and web pages, at 0.4 pages per minute, costing 29.7 cents per page. If the black ink runs out, it stops printing -- it can't be set to just use the remaining color ink. The capacity of the main paper tray is 150 sheets, a typical size.
SCANNING and COPYING. Scanning performance was very good, fine for general-purpose scanning. It can scan or copy an area up to 11.5 x 8.3 inches. Copying performance was very good, suitable for most purposes. There's an automatic document feeder to let you copy or scan a stack of pages in one operation. Includes OCR (optical character recognition) software, useful for making scanned documents editable in a word processor program.
CONTROLS and DISPLAY. The printer has a medium-size 2.4-inch display screen.
CONNECTIVITY and NETWORKING. It lacks USB PictBridge for direct printing from cameras. You can connect directly to a PC with a USB cable, or to your network router either wirelessly with WiFi or with an Ethernet cable. There's a WiFi Auto-connect feature that makes it easy to link to your wireless router. Google Cloud Print is built in, to print wirelssly from smart devices via the internet. You can also install Samsung's app on your smart phone or tablet, as another option for printing over your WiFi network. This model has built-in faxing, can store incoming faxes if the paper runs out, and can send faxes from an attached PC.
COST OF OWNERSHIP. The purchase price for this printer is about $105, which is very cheap for an all-in-one color laser printer. But printing uses up toner. Over time, as you print, the costs add up. After 2 years of use, we estimate the total cost to be $427, which is very low for a color laser. The estimated yearly cost is $161 -- so the 3-, 4- and 5-year estimates are $587, $748 and $909 respectively -- which is typical for this printer type.
