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Samsung Xpress M2825DW

M. David Stone
 & M. David Stone Contributing Editor

Our team tests, rates, and reviews more than 1,500 products each year to help you make better buying decisions and get more from technology.

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Samsung Xpress M2825DW - Samsung Xpress M2825DW
4.0 Excellent

The Bottom Line

The Samsung Xpress M2825DW monochrome laser can serve nicely as a personal printer, but its natural home is as a shared printer in a micro office.
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Pros & Cons

    • Small enough to share a desk with.
    • Ample paper capacity.
    • Automatic duplexing.
    • Ethernet.
    • Wi-Fi.
    • Wi-Fi Direct.
    • No additional paper handling options available.

Samsung Xpress M2825DW Specs

Color or Monochrome Monochrome
Connection Type Ethernet
Connection Type USB
Connection Type Wireless
Maximum Standard Paper Size Legal
Monthly Duty Cycle (Maximum) 12000 pages per month
Number of Ink Colors 1
Print Duplexing
Rated Speed at Default Settings (Mono) 29 ppm
All Specs

One step up in Samsung's line from the Editors' Choice Samsung Xpress M2625D($490.00 at Amazon) that I recently reviewed, the Samsung Xpress M2825DW ($150 street) delivers essentially the same output quality, paper handling, and speed on our tests. What it primarily adds for the step up in price is Ethernet and Wi-Fi, including Wi-Fi Direct, along with support for mobile printing. As with its lesser sibling, it delivers enough to make it Editors' Choice, but in this case as a shared printer in a micro office or as a personal printer if you need the network connection or mobile printing.

The mobile printing support lets you print through the cloud and print from Android, iOS, and Windows smartphones and tablets. For printing through the cloud, the printer has to be connected to your network, using either an Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection. For printing from a mobile device, however, you have two choices.

If the printer's on a network, you can connect through a Wi-Fi access point. Thanks to the printer's Wi-Fi Direct, however, you can also connect directly from your mobile device to the printer, a trick you can take advantage of even for a personal printer connected to your computer by USB cable.

Basics and Setup

Other than the network and mobile printing support, there's little difference between the Samsung M2625D and M2825DW. Both printers are the same size at 8.0 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD), making them small enough to share a desk with easily, and both weigh just 16.4 pounds. They also both offer the same paper handling, with a 250-sheet input tray, a one-sheet manual feed slot, and a duplexer (for automatic two-sided printing). This should be suitable for most personal or micro office use, but if you need more, you'll have to look elsewhere. Samsung doesn't offer any paper handling upgrades.

Setting up the M2825DW on a network is absolutely typical for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected it using the Ethernet port and installed the drivers on a system running Windows Vista.

Speed and Output Quality

Samsung rates the M2825DW at 29 pages per minute (ppm) compared with 27 ppm for the Samsung M2625D. The differences showed in my tests when printing a text file with little formatting, with the M2825DW coming in at 30.3 ppm, or not quite 2 ppm faster than the M2825DW. However, the two scored essentially identical speeds on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at 9.9 ppm.

Samsung Xpress M2825DW

As with the Ssamsung M2625D, this counts as a good speed for the price, but not a particularly impressive one. The Editors' Choice Brother HL-2270DW($356.00 at Amazon), for example, came in at 11.7 ppm.

The M2825DW was virtually identical to the Samsung M2625D for output quality in my tests as well. Text was easily good enough for any business needs, with scores falling in the middle of a fairly tight range that includes the vast majority of mono laser printers.

Graphics and photos were both absolutely typical for a mono laser. For graphics output, that translates to being suitable for any internal business need. Depending on how critical an eye you have, however, you may or may not consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts or the like. For photos, par quality means being able to print recognizable images from photos in Web pages and print photos in general at roughly newspaper-level photo quality.

The Samsung Xpress M2825DW is a strong contender not because of any particularly impressive feature, but because of a constellation of features that fit together well. It's not quite fast as the Brother HL-2270DW, for example, but it delivers a highly attractive balance of speed, output quality, paper handling, and more. As a shared printer in a micro office, or a personal printer that also makes mobile printing easy, that overall balance makes the Samsung Xpress M2825DW an easy pick for Editors' Choice.

Best Printer Picks

Further Reading

Final Thoughts

Samsung Xpress M2825DW - Samsung Xpress M2825DW

Samsung Xpress M2825DW Review

4.0 Excellent

The Samsung Xpress M2825DW monochrome laser can serve nicely as a personal printer, but its natural home is as a shared printer in a micro office.

Get It Now
Best Deal£1099

Buy It Now

£1099

About Our Expert

M. David Stone

M. David Stone

Contributing Editor

My Experience

Most of my current work for PCMag is about printers and projectors, but I've covered a wide variety of other subjects—in more than 4,000 pieces, over more than 40 years—including both computer-related areas and others ranging from ape language experiments, to politics, to cosmology, to space colonies. I've written for PCMag.com from its start, and for PC Magazine before that, as a Contributor, then a Contributing Editor, then as the Lead Analyst for Printers, Scanners, and Projectors, and now, after a short hiatus, back to Contributing Editor.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who worked on every "Project Printer" blockbuster PCMag ever produced, often writing 15 or more reviews for the year's big printer blowout. (I snuck in a single review one year when I was writing a book, strictly so I could keep that claim alive.)

I've always worked for PCMag as a freelancer, which has freed me to take time away to write nine books, be a major contributor to four others, and write for other publications, including Wired, Computer Shopper, Projector Central, and Science Digest, where I was Computers Editor. I also wrote a computer column at one point for The Newark Star-Ledger.

Although I started my career primarily as a science (mostly physics and astronomy) and science-fiction writer (published in Analog), my non-computer-related work runs the gamut from the Project Data Book for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (written for GE's Astro-Space Division) to the script for a video overview of a top company in the gaming industry (that would be gambling, not video games). My books include The Underground Guide to Color Printers (Addison-Wesley), Troubleshooting Your PC (Microsoft Press), and Faster, Smarter Digital Photography (Microsoft Press).

Having covered a wide range of subjects, I've developed a serial expertise in many of them. The ones most relevant to my current work at PCMag.com are all imaging technologies.

The Technology I Use

I buy new PCs for my writing desk infrequently, because it takes a week or more to customize the settings the way I want them. At the moment, I have an HP Envy tower running Windows 10, but it's old enough to have a Windows 7 sticker on it. Its latest lease on a longer life is courtesy of a newly installed 500GB Samsung SSD 870 EVO.

Elsewhere in my house is an assortment of older and newer PCs. The older ones are dedicated to specific tasks, like the one I've been using to slowly digitize all the paper stored in my filing cabinets, while the newer ones are testbeds for printer and projector reviews.

For writing, I use Microsoft Word 2003, because I find it too annoying to take my hands off the keyboard to give mouse commands using the Ribbon. My workhorse printers are a Xerox Phaser 6280 color laser and a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo for labels and stamps. I also have a Canon Pixma iP8720 for printing photos, and a Canon ImageFormula DR-C225 for scanning.

My first computer was bought to replace my IBM Selectric for writing. After rejecting both the IBM PC (which had just been introduced) and the Apple II because of the keyboards, I chose a Vector Graphics Vector 3 CP/M machine with dual floppies. The first MS-DOS machine I was willing to use for writing was the IBM AT, with its much-improved keyboard compared with the original PC and its gargantuan 20MB hard drive.

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