Purchasing a fax machine, scanner, printer and copier can be an expensive exercise. Can Samsung provide a multifunctional device that does all this without breaking the SOHO user's budget? Read our Australian review.

Samsung aims the SCX-4126F at the SOHO market at a reasonable price for the set of features it contains. It packs a laser printer (grayscale), a colour scanner, a copier (grayscale) and a fax into one device.

We had the device up and running within fifteen minutes of taking it out of the box, following the handy setup poster that was supplied. The SCX-4216F is fairly light and only requires 13kg of lifting strength to relocate. There are two durable carry handles built into the side of the SCX-4216F to aid portability.

The toner cartridge is easy to insert; simply flip down the front panel and slide it in until you hear it click in place. This four-in-one device supports connectivity through a parallel or a USB 1.1 port. There is a telephone line jack built in to the back of the unit for fax use. A user manual can be found on the supplied CD along with drivers for Macintosh and PC.

There is a very thin, 16-character by two-line LCD on the front panel of the SCX-4216F for displaying settings and the menu. Navigation is via the five buttons underneath it where you can scroll through the settings for paper, fax, copying, reports, sounds, and maintenance.

Beside these buttons are two large buttons for copy and stop/clear. On the left side of the LCD is an array of copy buttons to set number of copies, reduction/enlargement and contrast values. The special features supported for copying are clone, collation, auto fit, 2-side, N-up (multiple pages on a sheet) and poster copying.

To the right of the LCD is a numerical keypad with the fax buttons to the right again. Broadcasting faxes to multiple recipients is possible and there is a phone book to store frequently dialed numbers.

An automatic document feeder (ADF) is at the top of the printer with the input tray supporting 30 sheets at a time. There are two document output trays on the SCX-4216F; a large output space located below the control and a small tray for the ADF output.

The SCX-4216F is designed so that its narrowest dimensions are at the base giving it a much smaller footprint than the actual width of the main chassis. The MFD appears top heavy but overall it is an elegantly-shaped printer with contoured surfaces.

The front-loading cassette has a capacity of 250 sheets, so you'll only be able to fill the SCX-4216F with half of a standard ream of paper at a time.

We found no problem with the quality of printed text from the unit; all fonts and sizes are accurately reproduced. However, in our tests printing grayscale images the SCX-4216F produced scattered lines on what should have been consistent, dark sections of the picture.

Samsung claim the SCX-4216F has a maximum print speed of 16 pages per minute. During our tests printing text heavy documents at the normal resolution of 600 dots per inch (dpi), the printer peaked at about 11 pages per minute.

Scanning is quick and produces good results, especially on its highest resolution (4800 x 4800 dpi). Samsung bundles a suite for managing the scanner that includes optical character recognition (OCR) software to transfer printed text to rich text (RTF) or plain text (txt) file formats.

Samsung SCX-4216F
Company: Samsung
Price: AU$799
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 02 9763 9700

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