Samsung's SCX-4216F laser multifunction printer pushes new price boundaries for home and small businesses. This Samsung unit is priced below much of its competition, in an area where most consumers would only consider ink. Laser printers have benefits over ink models for mid to high volume users, thanks to a lower cost of operation and higher print speeds.

The Samsung machine is well designed, measuring 48 x 44 x 42cm, and weighing around 14kg. The beige unit features a flatbed scanner on top, behind a comprehensive and straightforward control panel. Parallel and USB connectors are provided as standard, but there's no way to hook the machine up to a network. The front-loading paper tray has enough room for a maximum to 250 sheets, and should suffice for most small businesses with light demands.

Unfortunately, we found the print speed a little disappointing, with the machine managing a sub-par 13 pages per minute in plain text, and 11 for mixed text and graphics. This isn't much of a concern if you're only going to use the printer in a home environment, but a busy small business could be kept waiting for pages. Samsung has managed to keep one eye on the total cost of operation - an important factor for any business - and there's a one-touch "Toner Save" button that the company claims manages to save 40% of the toner and is ideal for fast, draft printing.

The colour scanner operates at an optical resolution of 600dpi, and does a good job of reproducing tonal variations, with reasonable colour accuracy. We found the machine was a little biased towards green tones by default, and images required minor touch-ups in a photo editing application. That said, the quality is solid considering the relatively low purchase price, and will suffice for all but the most demanding home or small business users. And the machine will handle 33.6kbps faxing (provided the fax machine at the other end is compatible).

If you have relatively light printing requirements, the Samsung unit is a great choice. The two-year warranty should see the machine running reliably for its service life, and though it's relatively slow for a laser, it's good enough for most homes and small businesses. That said, higher volume users will be better served looking elsewhere.