Samsung's Good and Tidy Printer

This reasonably priced Samsung SPP-2040 produces high-quality pictures and takes up less space than a kid's lunch box

by Arik Hesseldahl

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Great print quality, simple to use

The Bad: Doesn't have keychain drive support

The Bottom Line: Well worth the small investment

Reader Reviews

Getting photos printed at the local drugstore is all but a thing of the past. Over the last year or so, several printer makers have introduced machines capable of churning out prints that are just as good, if not better, than the ones from around the corner. And the printers are getting better and cheaper all the time.

As part of a series of printer reviews (see BW Online, 5/18/06, "Canon's Powerful Picture Machine"), I tried out the Samsung SPP-2040, which is designed specifically for photos and sells for about $100. It comes in a compact, attractive package and produces some excellent prints.

QUICK PRINTS.

Of course, the package would have been a little more compact and attractive were it not for the paper cartridge protruding from the front. That aesthetic blight aside, the printer is a tidy package, a little smaller than the metal lunch boxes kids of my generation carried to school. It's 7 inches across, 5.25 inches deep, and just over 2.5 inches high. The cartridge kicks that back-to-front measurement up to a full 12 inches. I'd gladly accept a thicker unit with paper packed inside. Still, you can detach the cartridge when the printer is not in use.

But when it comes to cranking out prints, the results are excellent. Bright colors in prints I shot around the office come out very bold. One shot of a colleague wearing a bright blue shirt was particularly impressive. Details were sharp.

Printing time was pretty good as well. This is a dye-diffusion, four-color printer that uses an internal ribbon to make prints. For each picture printed, the paper goes in and out of the printer four times, one for each color. The nice thing is those four passes don't seem to slow anything down. Printing from a one-gigabyte CompactFlash card, each picture came out in 67 seconds.

SMALL FAILING.

That's a lot faster than on the Lexmark (LXK) P450 I reviewed last month (see BW Online, 4/14/06, "A Lexmark Printer That Misses The Mark"). But it's not quite as fast as the performance of the Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Photosmart 3310 (see BW Online 3/30/06, "A Printer To Make You Think Again").

The printer supports Pictbridge, an industry-standard technology that allows you to print pictures directly from the camera or a memory card. This is a great, increasingly common feature that renders connecting to a PC almost obsolete. I prefer printing directly from a memory card to printing from a PC. And the Samsung supports printing from all the major flash-memory formats, including CompactFlash, SD memory cards, Sony's (SNE) Memory Sticks, and xD Picture.

What's missing here is the ability to print from a USB keychain drive, those handy and oh-so-tiny devices that let you transfer files conveniently from one machine to the next. Many printers allow this. Samsung didn't offer much of an explanation for why this model doesn't. The company should rethink the decision when it next revises its product lineup, as there's a USB port conveniently located on the left-hand side of the unit. Samsung would rather you use that port for a Bluetooth device that would allow you to print from your PC or camera wirelessly. I didn't try that feature, but it seems to me that Bluetooth is so common now that practically any printer of any type should include it built-in.

Overall, this is an excellent printer and even though it's missing one feature I happen to like -- keychain drive support -- it's well worth the relatively small investment.

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com .