With wireless networked offices slowly becoming more popular, the need for wireless peripheral devices is gaining strength. One of the first office printers to have wireless networking built in is Samsung's ML-2152W mono laser.

The ML-2152W is a no-nonsense office workhorse of a printer; not overly attractive, but not offensively ugly either. It's very well built and churns out professional looking documents at high speeds, plus it's easy to use. Thanks to its easy-to-follow menu on the LCD panel, this is one office printer that doesn't need a network administrator to look after it, making it an ideal solution for the smaller networked office.

It offers a maximum print resolution of up to 1,200 x 1,200 dpi (dots per inch) and a rated print speed of 20 pages per minute for A4 or Letter pages. The output quality is excellent; not up to photo inkjet standard when printing photos, as you'd expect for this type of printer, but better than inkjet for text and business graphics. It's powered by a 166MHz Samsung processor, and comes with 16MB of memory as standard, which can be expanded to 144MB if required for larger, more complex print jobs.

As well as being fitted with an 802.11b wireless interface, the ML-2152W also has a 10/100Mbps network port and parallel and USB 2 ports, and supports PCL-6, IBMProPrinter and Epson emulations, as well as PostScript Level 3 with 136 fonts. What does all that mean? Well, you can print from just about any application you can think of, with the three most commonly-found interfaces for a network environment, as well as the wireless connection.

With a rated noise level of 53dB when printing and 35dB when in standby mode, it's not the quietest printer on the block, but neither is it the noisiest. The large LCD display has a selection of accompanying buttons that scroll through menus, allowing you to configure various settings, although as is normally the case most of these are best managed from the driver software. There are two useful buttons for duplex printing and cost-saving, toner-saver modes.

A 500-sheet tray holds the input paper and there's also a 100 sheet drop-down feed slot for other media such as envelopes. The claimed life for the starter toner cartridge supplied with the ML-2152W is 4,000 sheets, doubling to 8,000 for a standard sized cartridge at 5 per cent coverage.

Samsung's ML-2152W is one of the very few printers available that has wireless capability built in as standard, making it an ideal choice for the wireless office. But because of its multitude of connections and ease of use, it would make an ideal laser printer for any smaller company.