Samsung SCX 5935FN Monochrome Laser Multifunction Printer
Jun 6th, 2010 | By AnthonySamsung has always had good timing when sending us products, usually monitors and TV’s are welcome any day so I guess, by virtue of that: they have good timing. But our little printer here, the SCX-5935FN however came at an exceptionally good time. Students will know it well; it’s when the year wraps up and the final crunch toward exams and freedom. Many live it, and many will at least a few times in their lives. It’s the only time of the year where serious work gets done. So while public machines buzz constantly without stopping for weeks on end in front of queues of students, I had my SCX-5935FN and I feel, through my time of ownership and usage, that I’ve thoroughly tested it. See, being one of our wonderful digital age I’ve been indoctrinated with sharing. It’s quite simple actually: open up a binder, put everything into the top feeder, hit copy then distribute and repeat. I like to think that I am providing current and future students with at least some good material.
Top down and stapled it may not look like much, but that is at least 500 sheets. On average, the unit achieved a copy rate of 33 pages per minute, of course speed would vary depending on coverage but definitely, 33 copies a minute as advertised. The top feeder and double side printing feature work great, but I did experience a few jams. Consistently the culprit was loose leaf line paper. Running regular photocopy or printing paper through the top feeder will of course be much more reliable, but it should be noted that the mechanism isn’t the greatest for low poundage paper. The same goes for printing, the unit manages a steady 33 pages per minute. Over the course of a year it isn’t unreasonable to build quite a collection of readings, references, and other related course work. What better way to make use of it at the end than to pass it along? The SCX-5935FN does take a while to start up, the first page for either printing or copying is anywhere from 5 to about 10 seconds but that isn’t out of the ordinary.
While the SCX-5935FN is a black and white laser printer, occasionally one will find the need to print pictures. Probably not photographs or anything of that sort, but graphics related to documents. For the sake of demonstration, we’ll be printing a photograph: Strokkur geyser, Iceland.
Two copies were printed; one regular and one set to best quality then rescanned by the unit at 300 DPI.
At the highest quality, images printed show a higher range of contrast and overall are finer though clearly neither represent ideal photo printing, however remember that is hardly the point of the SCX-5935FN. For the occasional image, graphic, or charts the unit is excellent.
Our last measure of performance here will be power consumption. A printer when working draws a lot of power, but we already know that. The SCX-5935FN, being a bigger unit perhaps may draw a bit more power. It is however a bit difficult to judge exactly how much it is using, given usage does jump around a bit, but generally for printing and copying I observed an average of about 905W with a peak at about 1100W. Of course, this is only while running, idle the unit draws 18W and when sleeping 15W.
