Samsung SCX-4728FD Multifunctional Printer
Feb 15th, 2012 | By SimonGetting the SCX-4728FD ready for printing right out of the box is not difficult. The printer comes pre-loaded with a starter toner cartridge but I’ll quickly go over the steps required to install the toner. The first step is to pull the front door down. This will automatically cause the control panel to hinge up which is perfectly fine. Once the front door is open, you can pull out and slide in toner cartridges are required.
Here’s a close up look at the control panel and the hinge mechanism. To push the control panel back down into the body cavity, there is a lever you press to disengage the latch.
The last step to cover is loading the paper tray. At first glance when you pull out the paper tray it will look too small for your typical letter sheets and that is because it is! The paper tray needs to be expanded outwards by pressing on the tab and pushing out. I will admit that this is probably the most cumbersome process but once you get over this, the rest of the setup will be a walk in the park.
For the purposes of this review, I connected the SCX-4728FD to my router via the Ethernet connection. You may choose to use USB or wireless if you have the FW model.
Once you have the printer connect to either your PC or the network, you will want to install the drivers. Your typical Windows drivers will do for printing, but if you want to take advantage of the scanning features I suggest installing the Samsung Scanner Driver, Easy Print Manager, Scan Assistant and PC-Fax. The installation process takes about 5 minutes and is no more than 10 clicks!
The Print Manager provides a status check of the SCX-4728FD and let’s your launch the other Samsung apps as required (Scan Assistant, Fax, Web Service).
The web interface is nothing ground breaking and really requires no tweaking other than if you wish to add some default information to your printer (Address Book).
The Scan Assistant is the application I run the most. As the name suggests, it helps you configure your scan including what resolution to scan in, what size, allows you to preview the image for cropping and it eventually asks you where to save your scan and under what file format.
Now that we know how everything works, let’s do some testing.
To test the printer quality I printed a plain text document to find the page per minute. I did the test six times. The first three times were with a single document that I made 11 copies of. The last three times were with a single document that was 11 pages in length. I used 11 pages to determine the time for the first page to print and then used pages two to eleven to determine the page per minute rate. You can download a PDF copy of my test document here. I repeated this test but under duplex printing conditions with 22 pages.
Single Page Document Repeated 11 Times
Eleven Page Document Repeated Once
As one would expect the test results are fairly close to the rated speed.
Two Page Document Repeated 11 Times – Duplex Mode
Twenty-Two Page Document Repeated Once – Duplex Mode
During the test prints I recorded the average power draw. When the printer is sleeping it uses 8 watts. When the printer is in the Ready mode it draws 10 watts. On average a print job takes 391 watts with a peak draw being 859 watts. The 859 watts was during the middle of the print, not when the printer was warming up. Scanning a document is not power intensive; it drew a mere 16 watts.
In addition to completing some text prints I also printed some color pictures in black and white. You can download a PDF copy of my test document here.
As this is a multifunctional printer, here are what the scans of the print job look like.
During my use of the SCX-4728FD, I found that the print quality of text documents to be reasonably sharp and crisp. However, when I look closely at black and white pictures printed, I didn’t find it to be the sharpest. It had a bit of a blur to them, even when I printed pictures that had been converted over to black and white in Adobe Photoshop.
My other comment about noise is that the printer is very quiet when printing single sided documents. For any other task I found it to be on the noisier end. During the duplex printing I can hear the printer working hard to reverse the print side. When scanning off the glass it was quiet but the automatic document feeder sounded like it need to be lubricated!
Samsung SCX-4728FD is a best compare to other. These multifunction printers are Able to book pages in balance of pages per minute. They are Able to book both black and white forth with blush images with absolute ease. Their added capabilities like scanning, artful and faxing are additionally bigger than the ones you get with specific Stand abandoned devices.