Samsung SCX-3205 printer scanner

Samsung's recent SCX-4600 was an impressive black-and-white laser printer/scanner that was reasonably priced.

The new SCX-3205 is even cheaper, and although it's not as nice to look at as the earlier model, it is a bit smaller. It's compact, with a tray at the front that folds down to accommodate paper. Unlike on the larger model, though, this isn't covered, and unless you fold it away after use the device will take up a lot more room on the desk than it first seems to. Also, grey plastic guide sections inside the tray need to be moved depending on paper size, and these were fiddly and hard to shift.

Paper feeds out from the middle of the unit, with an extendable tray to catch the sheets before they fall out. The scanner at the top is covered by a flimsy plastic lid and the whole scanner section is hinged to allow access to the printer's innards to replace the toner cartridge.

Setup was fairly easy using the supplied CD, but although the software suggested connecting the SCX-3205 wirelessly, it went through the motions and told us that in fact we couldn't. It turns out the separate SCX-3205W model can be connected wirelessly. We plugged ours in using a USB cable (not supplied) and it worked fine, though the Samsung drivers and software took 15 minutes to install.

It was reasonably quick, working out at 4.4 pages per minute for black text, producing the first page in 10 seconds. There are two quality settings: normal and best, though both appeared to produce exactly the same print quality and in the same amount of time.

Cheap monochrome laser printers tend not to be good for pictures and the SCX-3205 was no exception: photographs on plain paper came out quite sharp but there was a lot of banding, but graphics for school or work (charts and diagrams) came out much better.

There is no screen, just a display showing the number of photocopies to be made, and so all communication is done through the software, which was fairly clear, and had an easy-to-follow troubleshooting guide.

A button on the device allows users to scan directly to the computer – insert your document, press the button and the image pops up on your computer's screen. It can also be controlled from the computer. Copies were quick and in decent quality.

While the scanner works in colour, copies are in black and white only, because of the black and white printer. As with the SCX-4200 a ‘print screen' button on the SCX-3205 will print out what's on your computer monitor(s).

Scans were quick at 300dpi and even an A4 page at 600dpi took only 45 seconds. Quality was not up to what we've seen from dedicated scanners such as the Canon 9000F but the Samsung driver does have lots of options such as descreening, useful if you're scanning from a magazine or newspaper.

The SCX-3205 is good at both printing and scanning, but given the flimsy paper tray and higher price we recommend the older SCX-4600 over this model.