Samsung SCX-5635FN Multi-Function Laser - Testing and Final Thoughts

General Usage and Testing:

As previously mentioned, the SCX-5635FN is designed to work in office environments that have a medium workload.  Many of these offices lease a copier that is much more expensive and has a much higher rated duty cycle than they need.  The SCX-5635FN is really built to shine in these situations.  While it may only be a monochrome device, the price:performance ratio is very good.  It has a lot of features including a G3 rated fax that is capable of 3 seconds per page transmission and receive speed.  In order to reach these speeds, you'll need good phone lines capable of 33.6kbps and an equally fast machine at the other end.

Faxing can be done through the ADF, flatbed machine or directly from your PC using the included software.  As this is a network machine, anyone on the network has access to print directly to fax.  Printing faxes can be delayed, single-sided or duplex as you choose.  You can use the intuitive on-screen controls on the device to set this up or make changes through the software or web interface.

Printing and copying have the same duplex options and you can choose to save paper or print single-sided on the fly.  Although many people don't use a scanner anymore, the SCX-5635FN gives you the option to scan and save documents to a network device, computer or a drive plugged into the USB port.  While this may not be its greatest selling feature, it is nice that they still offer this flexibility.

Samsung claims up to a 35ppm print speed on this device and we thought we'd test it out to see if they are even close.  We ran through several scenarios and have the results below.  When recording the times, we included the delay it takes to process the document and get the first page printed.  Samsung claims this is under 8.5 seconds and we noticed that this was accurate.  The times listed in the chart below include the initial delay.  If you subtract that 8.5 seconds, you'll see that when printing a large single-sided document, it does indeed reach the rated 35ppm speed.

Single-sided printing is blazing fast and like all printers, duplex takes a performance hit.  When printing a word document we see the speed drop from 35ppm to 19ppm.  This is still a respectable speed, but it takes almost twice as long to save half the paper.  Copying is a similar story and while the speed is slower, the above reported times include scanning the document as well as printing it.  You can see by comparing the 2 Page - 7 Copy output and the 14 Page - 1 Copy output that scanning documents is the bottleneck.  With that in mind, it is still a pretty speedy machine - must faster that the SCX-4521F.

Final Thoughts:

The SCX-5635FN is a nice machine that is a great upgrade from the aging SCX-4521F and this one supports Duplex printing as well as network functions giving it a better fit in a small office.  The copy features are very good and include enlargements, automatic document feeding, duplex copies and more.  Faxing and printing follow the same suit and that makes this machine very appealing.  You can find it online for ~$500 and while this may be more expensive than other devices consider the duty-cycle and and fit in your office.  It can pump out up to 80,000 pages per month and has large toner cartridges that yield up to 10,000 pages.  This makes it a great fit for those that may be spending $100 / month or more on a leased machine that does the same thing.  In less than six months, this would be paid for.

Setup and menu navigation is intuitive, print quality is stellar and the feature list is long enough to be very appealing.  It is simple to use, doesn't make a lot of noise and there is really nothing bad to be said about this product.  We connected it to our network and pounded it from multiple machine and weren't able to make it choke.  When using it hard from several machines, the paper tray gets empty fairly quickly and it would be nice to see it include a 500-sheet tray instead of the smaller 250-sheet tray.  Other than that, it's a top-notch product.

Pros:

• Great device for small offices
• Fast, high quality print speed
• Duplex available on fax, copy and print
• Expandable tray option to add another paper type
• Network ready and can be configured through software or web interface
• Easy to use menu system
  

Cons:

• Not a small unit - will take up a good chunk of desk space
• Main paper tray is only 250 pages - on a 80,000 page / month machine. 
  

 

I'd like to thank Samsung for sending this device our way.  It does everything I expected and does it well.  I just wish I didn't have to send it back.  It is a great upgrade from my existing SCX-4521F.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post them in the forum at the "Comments" link below.