Samsung CLX-3160FN Color Laser Multifunction Printer

List Price: $589.99 Discount Price: Too low to display

Features:

• Speed - Up to 16 ppm (B/W); Up to 4 ppm (Color)
• Resolution - Up to 2,400 x 600 dpi effective output
• First Page Out Time - 14 sec. (B/W); 26 sec. (Color)Copy -
• Copy Speed - Up to 16 ppm (B/W); Up to 4 ppm (Color)
• Resolution - Text, Text/Photo mode - 600 x 600 dpi; Photo mode - 1,200 x 1,200 dpi

Accessories:

3-Year Extended Service Plan - Covers Electronic Items $501-$1000 - Repair

Customer Reviews:

Samsung [Posted on 2008-03-14]
Bought this printer a year ago and didn't want to review without some time with use. Print quality is OK. It is not for anyone who would like photo quality prints. It does the job. Slow to start everything-Fax-Print-Sleep. If you want to send a quick fax, you need to be ready to stand at the machine and wait a few seconds to warm up. The ink is expensive as you can imagine on any new machine. Lots of replacement parts-drum, ink waste cartiridge,and ink that they will be happy to sell you for years. It only holds a small stack of blank pages. I'm still waiting for some producer to make something that can do all at a reasonable cost. I'm not sure on the cost per page, but I seem to be buying something for the machine every couple months. I am in my own home office. Hope this is helpful to someone!

Poor paper handling, pricy toner [Posted on 2008-03-17]
I have owned my Samsung CLX-3160FN for about six months and I have become so frustrated with its imprecise paper handling that I am shopping for a replacement. I purchased the CLX-3160FN for my small consulting business as a low volume copier, a sheet fed scanner and a color printer. The copies are adequate, the network scanner is nice (although every page is a separate file) but the color printer has me tearing my hair out.

I will load the CLX-3160FN with a fresh batch of laser paper, fanning the paper carefully before putting it in the tray and then send a 25 page color document. The results are a mess; my pages are designed with a line across the page 1" from the top separating the company logo from the information below. The problem is that my Samsung CLX-3160FN has such terrible, inconsistent paper handling that this line will end up randomly anywhere from 1/2" to 1 1/2" from the top. Leafing through the pages, the line bounces all over the place and looks terrible. I have taken to printing several batches at once and manually sorting sets with correctly aligned logos, high logos and low logos just to achieve a semblance of consistency. If you do ANYTHING which requires images or type to be in the same place on multiple sheets, AVOID this printer! All that said, the print images are usable; vivid but occasionally slightly fuzzy in my opinion. I find the color copies to be VERY off in a lurid way.

The final blow is how quickly this MFP goes through toner on me. While the toner cartridges aren't expensive, they seem to hold a fraction of the toner of other brands so if you do even modest volume expect to be changing cartridges every two or three months at $175+ a set. Even more frustrating, the waste toner bottle fills up every two sets of toner cartridges or so - and that's toner you paid a lot of money for which DIDN'T end up on a page.

And a word about Vista drivers; they exist, they work fine, BUT I had to download them. The CD which shipped with my printer just tried to install XP drivers and failed. Foolish me; since the carton said the printer was Vista certified I assumed the drivers were on the CD in the package; they were not.

Nice Machine - Curls Papers [Posted on 2008-03-17]
I have owned the Samsung CLX-3160FN for about 4 months now. I also have an HP Color Laserjet 2600n. I have to admit I don't use the Samsung as much for print jobs. I normally use the HP for printing and the Samsung for copying and faxing. My HP was running low on ink and I had a large job to print out. I am a consultant and put together reports with pictures and maps that I bind with a comb binder. The print has to be of high quality for these reports. I sent the 79 page report with detailed pictures and maps to the Samsung and I have to say it worked very well. The pictures were of high quality, just as good as the HP and the text was very good also. The only thing I didn't like is that it curls the pages at the top and bottom. I don't mean it wrinkles them or ruins them. They just don't lay flat when you put them down. They tend to curl up. That wouldn't be much of a problem but it does make it harder to bind the report afterwards. Also the report does not look as professional when it looks like it wants to roll itself up. There was mention of that from a previous reviewer and when I read it a few months ago I thought it was a bit petty. But I have to admit that it makes a difference in how the finished product looks. I have had no problems with print quality or paper jams. The paper I use for my reports is 28 lb weight 102 brightness so it is high quality paper. I think that may make a difference with the print quality and paper handling. I also use 22 lb / 98 brightness paper for regular printing and have had no problems with the Samsung using those either. In general I am very happy with the machine. I have the fax set on a comswitch that takes care of routing the phone calls to the proper device so have had no issues with the fax stealing the voice calls. I also use 32 lb weight 110 brightness paper for marketing materials and it is handling those good also. I just don't like the curling of the pages. I have to mention also that I use the Samsung for all my copying. I copy multiple pages, over 20 pages at a time and have had no problems with the automatic sheet feeder. I had only one jam and that was my fault because I put the paper in the sheetfeeder crooked. I also forgot to remove a staple once and that made a mess of the document in the sheet feeder. But other than those operator errors I have had no problems with the sheet feeder. Oh, also you need to put the paper stop in the out position or the pages will go flying out of the printer when there is more than a few pages printing.

I had high hopes but at the end I am very dissapointed.  [Posted on 2008-03-19]
I really hate to write a negative review - in fact this is the first negative review I ever wrote - but two printers later and nearly BURNING THE OFFICE DOWN pushed me over the edge.

This printer has high potential, it has many wonderful features but it means nothing when most of my day was spent on clearing/fixing paper jams, random clicking and constant errors. A little background about myself: I'm a mechanical engineer, software programmer, and a former IT. I have extended knowledge of networks and computers, so please understand that my frustration does not come from ignorance. As an engineer I respect Samsung for their time and efforts of designing the printer - I understand that a lot of time is sacrificed even on a `crappy' product. It seems that the ideas worked really well on paper - a feature packed printer for an affordable price - but perhaps somewhere along the process their budget was shorted, or quality management failed as so many corners ware cut short.

Anyway, I purchased this printer for my office, it's a small office with a five person network. As I had good experience with Samsung brand equipment before, I decided that this multifunction printer will be adequate. As the printer just hit the market, most of review ware positive and promising. The network installation took me 1.5 minutes and was straight forward; it sent fax, it scanned and it printed - perfect! What else would I need out of a printer?... reliability maybe!

Although it had many good features, the reliability was less than ideal. I soon discovered that most of the features ware really half baked. The network printing itself was solid, but network scanning and faxing worked half of the time... it usually took a restart of the printer to get it working again, and restarting became a normal office phenomenon.

The most unfortunate part of the printer is the paper tray feeder, it jammed daily, to the point where I would spend more time fixing the jams than working. Most jam would happen while printing in color, for some reason the paper would catch on some under-engineered piece of plastic and fold in like an accordion, leaving a nasty half baked goo on the rollers. Soon the printer would leave really nasty stains and smudges on the paper because of the dirty rollers. The quality became unacceptable and cleaning the rollers would mean disassembling the printer which I would not about to do.

The toner cartridge also developed a problem. Although the change of the toner is as simple as it can be, the design, size and price is not ideal. They are very high priced for amount of toner they posses, on average, the toner would last me less than 500 pages which is way less than advertised, and at $60 a pop, toners became a big expense. I believe that faulty printer drivers are also to blame, with every toner change the overflow container would be full, meaning that half of my toner went to waste! Also, for some reason the toners would slightly pop out of the holder and the sprocket wheels would start sliding and damaging the printer and the cartridge. It got to the point where I had to insert a paper clip to hold the black toner in place.

Convinced that my printer was a lemon, I took it back to the store for replacement. As I purchased extended warranty (and I'm glad I did) I received a brand new replacement (the same model). Hoping that my troubles ware over, I soon found myself in the same position as before. The toner started making loud clicking noises right after installation, and paper jams started soon after. The only difference was no smudging (yet).

The last straw came less than a week after receiving the new printer. While receiving a fax, the printer jammed and froze! Immediately it started spewing black smoke as it COUGHT ON FIRE!!!! I opened the printer to discover that two sheets of paper jammed on the `iron' roller. I'm really glad that I was in the office at the time, as if this happened at night it could potentially burn the whole office down! I did not believe that this was possible to happen. Nevertheless, I was able to return the printer for a full refund under warranty, but the whole experience really scarred my image of Samsung, I'm really disappointed at this printer and at Samsung. Unfortunately this review might cut into Samsung's profits, but I hope they will learn not to cut corners in the future and not to release under-developed and potentially dangerous printers. I eventually purchased a Brother MFC-9440CN as an replacement and I'm very happy with it. Not a single problem yet!

So, on the final note - would I recommend this printer to anyone? Absolutely not, not worth the hassle and potential life devastation!

very bad machine!!! [Posted on 2008-03-31]
after reading all the reviews about this thing and I still went ahead I bought it!!!,( big dummy ). terrible machine it jams all the time and when it finally prints you get all kinds of terrible ckacking noises in the process, I would not recommed this product to anyone ( unless you do what I did; ignore all the bad reviews and try it for yourself )
but be prepared to get frustated.

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