Which may utter you to ask "who needs a monochrome printer?" or "why get a monochrome printer?"

Offices still make use of monochrome printers and it is perhaps one of the most indispensable equipment along with copiers and scanners. In fact, printers such as the SCX-4300 can do more than just print.

You can describe the SCX-4300 printer in one word -- "multifunction." It can print, as well as scan and copy documents. With printing as its base function, all you need to do is install the printer driver to a PC and connect the printer there.

First, make sure that you set up the printer by placing the toner cartridge in the printer. The cartridge slot is located at the front and is a bit tight so be careful not to push it to much.

You’ll also notice that the top portion is the flatbed scanner. The gap undeneath is the output bay and you can lift the flatbed scanner about an inch farther to give space for print outs (which can take about 50 pages or so).

Be careful though since this portion doesn’t separate from the whole printer so just lift it gently until it stops fixed.

Below the output bay is another gap that’s a little smaller. This is the single-sheet manual tray and it’s actually for copying special media types like envelopes or paper that’s thicker than a standard bond paper.

The scanner’s cover is also adjustable to about an inch higher in case you will be copying from thick books or magazines.

Once the driver is installed, you can now print to your heart’s content. On the scanner portion, there is a dot-matrix display and a control panel if to be used as a stand-alone device. The supplied SmaThru software lets users exploit the SCX-4300’s other features like scanning and copying.

With the incorporated scanner, you can scan colored images of up to 600 dpi resolution. From there, you can save it as a file on your PC or send it thru email.

But as stated, you can use the SCX-4300 as a standard copier without the use of a computer. From the printer’s control panel you can set paper settings, reduce or enlarge copies, adjust the toner’s contrast, and choose from several special copy features.

The button labeled "copies" is what you’ll press to set how many prints you want for each copy made (from one up to 99). Since’s there are no number keys, you have to use the left and right arrow keys beside the "OK" button to select your desired value of prints.

To be honest, it’s the print quality we are after and not how many pages it can cough out in a minute. Our verdict is that has quite an impressive printout for text documents. But in the case of text and photo combined, you have to adjust the toner’s darkness to light. This way, the photos would come out clear.

The same goes if you are to copy text and photo documents; you have to set the toner manually or else the photos would come out black . Also, if you change the settings of the paper size, toner darkness, or the reduce/enlarge feature, it would all go back to the default setting after half a minute.

This would be the printer’s weakness. And to resolve it, you have to make changes in the "copy setup" settings. It’s like saving a particular profile for your preferred function. Although saving more than one specific setting is not possible, so you have to change it again if a different setting is needed.

During the printer’s stay at the lab, we’ve encountered very few paper jams here and there, but not very often. We’re even able to use recycled paper and it functioned pretty good (about three paper jams occured).

Depending on where the paper get’s stuck, you have to pull it from the output bay or inside the toner cartridge slot (which means you have to take out the toner first).

It’s physical size wouldn’t be a problem since it’s a bit compact for a multifunction printer. Although it’s a bit heavy when you carry it so it has to be placed on a specific place, taking consideration of the space behind it for the paper tray when it is expanded.

The paper tray at the bottom is detatchable and can carry about 250 pages of paper from A4 to legal size. Not bad, really.

It would have been better if the power button was placed either on the left or right side of the printer. And don’t look for a USB port or card reader since the display won’t be able to show you the files you would want to print. That’s left to a more, full featured printer, and perhaps a colored one.