The Samsung Xpress M2625D($490.00 at Amazon) is the kind of highly attractive package that stands out from the crowd, which is quite a trick for a mature category like personal monochrome laser printers. Along with the appropriately low price and a small enough size to let it sit comfortably on your desk, it delivers reasonably fast speed, high-quality output across the board, and unusually capable paper handling. The combination makes it an Editors' Choice.

The M2625D's least strong point—I wouldn't call it an actual weakness—is its speed. Although it was a bit slower on our tests than the Editors' Choice Brother HL-2240 it outdoes the Brother printer in other ways, with an automatic duplexer (for two-sided printing) and slightly better quality for text and graphics. Both printers connect only by USB cable, which is what makes them decidedly personal printers.

Also helping define both as personal printers is that they're both compact enough to take up less space on your desk than most inkjets. The M2625D is just 8.0 by 14.5 by 13.2 inches (HWD). It's also light enough, at 16.4 pounds, for one person to move easily.

Setup

For my tests, I installed the M2625D on a system running Windows Vista. I ran into one potentially confusing setup issue. The installation program, which is apparently written for multiple Samsung models, includes options for installing the printer for wired or wireless network connections, which the printer doesn't offer. If you don't already know to ignore those choices, there's no hint on screen that you should.

At the very least, the program should include a comment with each network option indicating that not all models support it. Even better would be a list of which models each option applies to. Without this information showing, I suspect some people will wind up trying to connect by network options that simply don't exist in the printer. Once you get beyond that issue, however, setting up with a USB connection is standard fare.

Speed and Output Quality

On our business applications suite (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), I clocked the printer at 9.9 pages per minute (ppm). That qualifies as a good, but not great, speed for the price. It makes the M2625D faster than the Dell B1160w Wireless Mono Laser Printer, for example, at only 7.3 ppm, but slower than the HL-2240, at 11.4 ppm. Also worth mention is that the M2625D was a bit faster than its 27 ppm rating for printing a text file with little formatting. I clocked it at 28.4 ppm.

The output quality is in the typical range for a mono laser across the board. Text in my tests was in the middle of a fairly tight range where the vast majority of mono laser printers fall. That translates to being easily good enough for any business need.

The graphics were dead on par for quality, making them good enough for any internal business need. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may or may not consider them good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like as well. Photo quality was also typical for mono lasers, which translates to printing recognizable photos from Web pages or for handouts that don't require any more than newspaper-level photo quality.

This printer offers unusually capable paper handling for personal use. In addition to the automatic duplexer, it includes ample capacity, with a 250-sheet paper tray, plus a one-page manual feed slot, so you don't have to swap out the paper in the tray every time you want to print a page or two on a different paper stock. The better than par paper handling, the solid scores for speed and output quality, and the small size make for a highly attractive printer for the price. More to point, the Samsung Xpress M2625D offers the right balance of features to make it Editors' Choice for personal monochrome laser.

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