The business philosophy of Samsung Electronics states that it's highly important to provide exactly the product that customers need, no more no less. They also seemingly spend a large amount of time evaluating their own products through 'the eyes' of their consumers. One of their products, the Samsung ML 2150 is a very affordable monochrome laser printer that can be set up to work for a workgroup. When they released it, which is quite a few years ago, it was probably a remarkable product. Prices of color laser printers were sky high and it's understandable why someone would want to save up on money and stick to monochrome.



Since technology evolved a lot and color laser printers are already relatively affordable, there's no telling what the purpose of a mono laser printer is nowadays. But it's true that this printer was released quite a while ago and I guess there are still companies out there, saving up on money, specially during the recession. The ML 2150 thus is the ideal choice for an office that requires high volume black and white printing.

The Samsung laser printer ML 2150 can print on media up to legal (8.5 x 14 inches) to A4. It has a maximum resolution of 1200 dpi and a paper capacity of 600 sheets (without any optional media tray). This means that you won't have to replace the paper in it that often, specially compared to competing products. Oddly enough its design is compact and stylish. Back in the day it was actually among the smallest printers on the market. It will work on pretty much any available operating system including Windows, Linux or Mac (and apparently SunSoft Solaris).

The printing speed (for black as it has no color) is of 20 pages per minute which used to be great but now just manages to be average. Nevertheless it's a great speed for an affordable device. With a monthly cycle of 100,000 pages it just about fits any small office's needs. It comes with 16MB of installed RAM which can be expanded up to 144MB and holds a processor of 166Mhz

Another feature that makes it very convenient for office use is the built in duplexer. What this means is that you can print on both sides of the page, without having to bother to re-insert the sheet, thus saving time and paper, and possibly even avoiding frustration. While it's easy to connect the printer to a PC through the included USB port, there is also a parallel port in case older systems are still in the office.

You can still find this printer on the market, for roughly $250. It's dirt cheap compared to other office printers. Sure, it may not provide color printing and its quality and speed may be a bit behind what more modern products are offering, but for this kind of money, the Samsung laser printer ML 2150 has great features and reliability.