Samsung ProXpress C3060FR review

Samsung's ProXpress C3060FR is a colour multifunction peripheral which can print, scan, copy and fax double-sided documents. Although it looks compact enough for the home, it's primarily aimed at small offices. Business-friendly features include a Gigabit Ethernet port for fast data transfers and a USB host function, but bizarrely, there's no dedicated port for it - you need to reach around the back to plug in a USB stick.

This is a quick printer - Samsung claims it can deliver up to 30 black or colour pages every minute - but there are other gaps in its specification. Chief among these is the meagre 250-sheet paper tray fitted as standard. At least you can upgrade with up to two 550-sheet paper cassettes, which, taken together with the standard 50-sheet multipurpose feed, gives you a maximum 1,400-sheet capacity. The touch-sensitive control panel is smart and easy to use, but surprisingly for a modern Samsung printer, there's no standard Wi-Fi or NFC interface.

Laser class devices (strictly speaking the C3060FR uses LED light for imaging) are often noisy, but it's easy to live with this printer. There's a minimum of clunking or scraping from the paper transport, while its fans quickly stop after a print job.

Things get going again fairly quickly, too. I timed the first page out at 11 seconds from standby, or 15 seconds after it had sat idle for an hour. I couldn't get very close to Samsung's stated speed in our tests, however, as the printer kept re-calibrating itself mid-job. This is usually only something we see on new printers and I'd expect it to happen less often with further use, but the best speeds I timed were 19.7ppm when printing mono text, and a still-impressive 18.5ppm on our complex colour graphics test.

Elsewhere, helped no doubt by dual processors and its fast Ethernet connection, the C3060FR was blisteringly quick. I timed a single black A4 copy at nine seconds, while a colour copy took 13 seconds. Using the 50-page automatic document feeder, a 10-page copy took about 35 seconds in black or colour. Previews of an A4 page, or scans at 150 or 300 dots per inch (dpi) took only eight seconds, while scanning a 6x4" postcard took only six seconds at 600dpi, or 15 seconds at 1,200dpi.

I was impressed with the quality of this MFP's results. Scans were pin-sharp with accurate colours, and detail was preserved in all but the darkest shades of our originals. Text was perfect, and graphics were detailed and free of artefacts, although some tests did print with a slightly warm colour bias. I wasn't overly impressed with the brown bias in colour photocopies, but otherwise both they and mono copies were good.

Samsung ships the C3060FR with a 4,000-page black toner and 2,500-page colour toners, while replacements are rated at 8,000 and 5,000 pages respectively. At the best prices we could find, running costs work out at 5.7p per page, broken down as 0.9p for the black part and 4.8p for colour. That's extremely competitive for a laser-class device, but I'm not convinced that it offsets the C3060FR's steep price, particularly when you consider that it's not especially highly specified.

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