Running a small or even a medium scale business has always been about finding the right balance between cost and effectiveness. It’s a balancing act really, where you have to give up features on equipment to save money or stump up more cash so as to get the features you need. When it comes to printers, it is very rare to find a machine that doesn’t force businesses to choose between key features. After all, adding elaborate features to the device increases the cost price of Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) too. However, the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX is a multifunction printer that doesn’t demand sacrifices from business owners.
You see, the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX is a printer that offers all the features that any small to medium scale business may need. There is good output quality. There is good scope for high volume printing. Speed is decent. And, all of this is available at a considerably affordable cost of ownership. While the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX does a very good job at bringing together key features, this, by itself, causes certain negatives to become evident.
If you’re considering buying the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX, then you need to know these negatives as much as these positives. Additionally, your decision making process will also have to take into account the availability of the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW. For your benefit, here is our Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX review that contains comparisons with the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW.
Strengths of Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX
You can call the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW brothers. In fact, they’re so similar that you can even push the envelope and call them twins that were birthed a few minutes apart. The direct result of this is that a lot of their strengths are similar too.
First and foremost, let’s cater to the most important strength of both these printers – output quality. The output quality of the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX as well as its younger twin is much better than most other multifunction colour laser printers falling in the same class. Both the printers are rated to print at resolution up to 9600 x 600 dots per inch (dpi). This capability combined with the Rendering Engine for Clean Page (ReCP) of Samsung results in exceptional final print output. While the vibrancy of the image is ensured through the high resolution of the printers, ReCP adds sharpness by improving the focus on graphics and images.
Despite exceptional print output quality, neither the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX nor the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW make their users suffer monetarily. Since the technology behind the two printers is virtually the same, they have identical running costs. The per page cost you’ll incur by using genuine toner cartridges in the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX will be to the tune of 19.5 cents. However, if you don’t have any reservations about using generic toner cartridges and actually welcome the cost benefit they bring, then you can run the C2680FX for only 13.3 cents per page. That’s a reduction of 6.2 cents per page. It means that for every 100 pages you print, you’ll end up saving more than $6.
The Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and C2670FW provide good output quality and cost effectiveness along with high volume printing ability. The monthly duty cycle of both these multifunction colour laser printers is 60,000 pages. It is justified too because both these printers’ total paper capacity is around 300 sheets split between the 250-sheet paper tray and the 50-sheet multipurpose tray. If these aren’t enough, then you can actually go for the optional 520-sheet paper tray to take your total paper capacity to 820 sheets.
It is also worth mentioning that both these printers support automatic duplex printing. You can combine the automatic duplexing feature with the one-touch Eco mode to further increase the cost effectiveness of these printers. An added benefit of the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX that it doesn’t share with its younger twin is scan speed. The C2680FX is capable of scanning at a maximum speed of 60 images per minute (ipm) depending upon its complexity. At the very least, estimates suggest that this printer’s scanner will not go below the speed of 35 ipm.
Weaknesses of Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX
With respect to weaknesses, there aren’t many. However, the ones that are there could be deal breakers for you, depending upon your specific reach and requirements. For instance, both the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW are priced on the higher side by the OEM. Moreover, as is obvious, the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX is actually dearer than the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW.
Depending on where you get it from, the difference in their prices could range from anything between $300 and $600. Barring the fact that these prices may put these printers out of reach of some prospective buyers, the prices are justified considering the types of features and capabilities being provided. Furthermore, with the low operating costs, both these printers would pay for themselves in savings fairly quickly.
There’s another major flaw of the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX that could prove to be a deal breaker for you. The C2680FX doesn’t come with Wi-Fi Direct capability in the standard version. In fact, the standard configuration of the C2680FX only offers USB 2.0 and Ethernet connectivity options. This is a strange omission in the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX because its younger twin comes standard with Wi-Fi Direct capability. Fortunately, Samsung has made it possible for buyers of the C2680FX to get Wi-Fi direct and active NFC capability by offering the same as an add-on feature.
Key Features of Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX
The Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX is bigger and heavier than the C2670FW because of some added features. The C2680FX is 530mm wide, 484.2mm deep, and 524.3mm tall while the C2670FW is 469mm wide, 452.5mm deep, and 504.3 tall. The difference in weight between the two is only 1.6 Kg with the C2680FX weighing 28.2 Kg and the C2670FW weighing 26.6 Kg.
The primary differences between the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and the C2670FW are inbuilt memory and processing capabilities. The C2680FX comes standard with a 1GHz Dual Core processor while the C2670FW only has a 533 MHz Dual CPU processor. Furthermore, the C2670FW has inbuilt memory of only 512MB while the C2680FX has an inbuilt memory of 1GB. Samsung offers users the option to increase this inbuilt memory to 2GB in C2680FX and to 1GB in C2670FW.
The two also differ with respect to their hard disk drive capacities. The C2670FW only comes with a 4GB SD Card while the C2680FX comes with a handsome hard disk drive storage capacity of 320GB. Another difference between the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2670FW is in their control panels. The C2680FX boasts of 177.8mm touchscreen LCD while the C2670FW only has a 109.22mm touchscreen LCD.
Both the Samsung ProXpress SL-C2680FX and the C2670FW come with Samsung’s eXtensible Open Architecture (XOA) platform which allows Samsung’s partner solutions to be integrated with their devices. However, the C2680FX has this platform embedded into its software while the C2670FW only gets access to the XOA platform through the web interface.
The speed of printing of these printers is firmly in the mediocre range when compared to their competitors. Both of them are rated at a healthy, if uninspiring, print speed of 26 pages per minute (ppm).
Leave a Reply