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The Samsung Xpress C1810W is a laser printer.  I presume the “C” part of its title indicates this is a colour model while the “W” provides the clue that the product has wireless capabilities.  Rather sturdy in its physical presence, as the state of my back testifies to, the Xpress C1810W has dimensions of 420 x 426 x 264mm (W x D x H).  Its weight of 16.62kg means you are not going to want to reposition this printer on a regular basis.

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Sticking with the basic box shape with rounded corners to add a touch of style, this Samsung laser printer is decked out in computer grey with a black top.  The Xpress C1810W laser printer requires four toner cartridges.  In order to insert these cartridges into the body of the printer, you need to lower the front of the box by pressing on a button on the top of the unit.  Once the yellow, magenta, cyan and black are securely in position, you can close the cover before adding the printer to your computer system.

When connecting this colour laser printer to your system you have a choice of USB, wired or wireless network.  Sockets for USB and Ethernet are located at the rear of the box along with mains power and an on/off switch.  Located at either side of the printer are removable covers concealing the control board on the left side and waste toner container on the right side of the printer.

Paper input is front the front of the unit where a pull out tray sits.  This tray combines the main input source plus a manual feeder with adjustable width guides.  Paper output is at the top of the printer where a lift up flap ensures printer documents are not scattered all over the place.

The top of the printer is also home to the unit’s control panel.  Heading this control panel is a two line LCD window displaying the current status and prompts that will appear during various operations.  Just below this LCD screen are four LEDs representing the different toner cartridges.  Appropriately coloured yellow, magenta, cyan and black, these LEDs glow red to indicate when a cartridge needs replacing.

Based around an OK button, a navigation compass wheel features menu mode with left, right and back options.  An arrangement of four buttons, positioned beneath the compass wheel, can be used to switch to Eco mode, enabling the WPS feature, cancelling an operation and a power button.  Completing this control panel are two LEDs providing feedback as to the status of the machine and wireless activity.

A software CD is included in the package.  This CD will install the driver required by the printer and allow you to select from various utilities for use with this printer.  Among the choice available are Easy Print Manager, Easy Capture Manager and Easy Colour Manager plus a PDF version of the User Guide.  As part of the software set up process, you will be lead through the necessary steps to add the printer to your network using either a wired or wireless connection.

The print driver supplied with this colour laser printer offers you an initial choice of Normal, Eco or 2-sided printing with further options for Portrait, Landscape or 180 degree rotation.  You can also select from the five document types of Standard, Photo, Business Graphic, CAD and Web Page.

Samsung has rated this printer at 18 pages per minute.  However when I checked out the printer’s speed, I was disappointed.  Using the standard settings with a 512-word document, the first page took 21 seconds to appear and was then followed by a further 14 pages during the next minute.  This gave an overall speed of 15 pages per minute. 

Switching to Eco mode with options that included the removal of small lines, grey tint and the removal of bold font style using greyscale resulted in a saving of 66% in toner and 88% with regards to colour.  The first page took 18 seconds to appear.  Again there was an overall speed of 15 pages per minute.  There was very little different in print quality between Normal and Eco mode.  It was noticeable that there was a distinct pause between the appearance of the 15th and 16th copy in an 18-page print run.

The Xpress C1810W supports wireless printing once the appropriate app has been installed on a smartphone.  This support includes NFC technology as you tap your smartphone on the front left top corner of the device for the selected image to be printed.

I felt the Xpress C1810W was more at home when dealing with text whether in normal or Eco mode.  When printing pictures on photo paper, the images lacked any sparkle and look a little flat.

At the time of writing Amazon.co.uk was listing this colour laser printer at £162.  A genuine Starter Rainbow pack of the four toner cartridges is priced at £95.99.  The black toner cartridge is expected to produce 2500 pages with the colour cartridges rated at 1800 pages.

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/print-solutions/print-solutions/colour-printers/SL-C1810W/SEE