Our 6060S is actually the higher end 6000 series printer – it comes with parallel, USB, and Ethernet connections. The regular 6060 (which is equipped with 4MB of RAM) does not come with an Ethernet card, but this is a simple add-on that you can purchase should your home or office have need of it. We LOVE network printers, so we did all our testing with the printer hooked up to our 10/100 network.

One thing we’ve loved about Samsung printers is their cross-platform support. Once again we see driver support for most major platforms, including Mac, Linux, Windows 95, 98, 2000, and NT. Samsung uses their SyncThru software for network admin – this software is available on Windows 9x, NT 3.5, 4.x, 5.x, and Novell Netware 3.x, 4.x, and 5.0. Network installation in a simple peer to peer Win9X network was extremely easy – the printer’s Ethernet adapter will automatically configure itself through a local DHCP server, if one is available, so that even without any management software you can get up and running in just a few minutes. I managed to hook up 6 computers to the printer by installing Samsung’sWindows drivers and adding an IP network port to each of the printer installs. Total time: less than 15 minutes.

To test the print speeds, we printed a 30 page PDF document with mixed type pages combining text and a few basic images. Even on this mixed type page the print speed was around 5.4 seconds a page, or 11 pages a minute. The first page in our tests always printed in less than 25 seconds, and on text only documents the first page is already out in 16 seconds, which comes very close to the specifications.

Print quality in all our tests was very good. Text quality was excellent down to a 6 point font, and was legible down even to 2 and 3 point fonts (most users will not go to such low font sizes). Our font face tests showed the text to be crisp, clean, and noticeably easier to read on Courier type fonts than text printed on the lower end ML-4500. Graphics showed a good even distribution of grey scale tones, but graphics printing quality was less impressive than we had hoped to see from a 1200dpi printer. Demanding tasks that required brute force dark background shades were printed with ease, but tasks that demanded more delicate grey tone variations were only average for a printer of this class.

A nice feature on all of Samsung’s printers is their Toner Saver mode, which is said to save up to 40% of toner usage on printed documents. I like the single drum/toner units that Samsung uses, and the 6000 series toners are rated at 6000 pages at a standard 5% coverage. We printed out quite a few tests with Toner Saver mode enabled and for the most part the print quality is indistinguishable. You could leave Toner saver mode and get 8000+ pages for each toner/drum replacement. At around $80-90 per toner replacement, your cost per page works out to be around 1.5 cents a page. With Toner Save enabled, your cost drops to 1.1 cents a page (remember, all costs do not include paper consumables). That’s pretty good value!

It is worth mentioning that throughout my tests the ML-6060 really felt like a quality product, especially thanks to its amazingly whisper quiet operation. The warm up procedure is a nice low hum, and printing is a very smooth and quiet process.

Conclusion

There are many factors that make this printer an excellent product for any small-medium printing task. Easy setup and low cost form the bulkhead of this argument, but ultra smooth operation and fast printing of quality pages make a strong statement too. The 6060S is basically the top of the line in the 6000 series, and it still comes in around $799 Canadian MSRP (that’s less that $550 USD). The ML-6060N is the same as the 6060S, minus PostScript III support and Mac support (it still includes the network support). And finally the ML-6060, with 4MB base memory and without the fancy network support, goes for around only $400USD. I heartily enjoyed using these printers, and they will be well suited for many small offices or homes that require this type of volume and speed.

Overall Score: 87%