Office Style at a home-office price

I bought our SCX-4521F at CompUSA in July, 2006 for $249.99. (Review written August, 2008.) So it's no longer the newest or the slickest. But the price has come down, and it has been satisfactory in our light home-office use.

My purchase decision was based on monochrome laser printing, photocopying w/book copying possible, and occasional scanning. I was a little worried about whether the automatic document feeder-ADF (a luxury I'd avoided on our last printer) would hold up. I put our second toner cartridge in on 2/4/2008, and the diagnostic printout that day lists 3830 total pages and 541 scans since 2006. I have to guess that I've probably put a few hundred pages through the ADF. I've done almost no faxing with this machine, although I did test the fax and it worked fine.

The printing (USB or Parallel Port) with our Win XP machines has been excellent, including network printing from a laptop on the home network. (Note, that's through the running desktop, this printer does not have a network connection.) The scanning software that comes with the printer (SmarThru 4) seems a little slow, but works very well and is easy to use. Even the free OCR processor works quite well. You can scan to various file formats, including .PDF . One reason I don't use this printer for fax is that (despite a huge menu of setup options) you can't set the fax for "Manual Only Receive", which I sometimes need to avoid junk faxes. So I still use our old, freestanding fax machine.

I would prefer if the input tray could hold more sheets (seems to be 50-75). But it's very easy to insert an envelope for printing without having to touch the pile of paper. I've had very few paper jams.

With some difficulty, I've done two-sided printing by reinserting the printed pages, but this is not recommended for the faint of heart.

If there's any downside to the SCX-4521-F, it's noisier than other laser printers I've had. It doesn't make any noise while sitting waiting for use in auto-sleep mode, and it shuts down after about three minutes after the last use. But the internal whirring and fan noise are irritating if you sit next to the machine, even while paper is not going through it. Warmup to first print is 30 seconds or less.

At purchase time, this was at the high end of the price I was willing to pay, but it has turned out very well. The ADF has been a pleasant luxury a few times a year, and the machine has performed flawlessly in light but steady home use.