Installation's a Cinch
The M6552NW weighs a little less than most entry-level mono laser AIOs, at 18.7 pounds. It's among the smallest, too, at 12 by 17 by 12 inches (HWD). This makes it easy to move into place and small enough to share a desk with. Physical setup is easy, too. There's little to do beyond removing the packing material—including from the toner cartridge, which is shipped inside the printer—and optionally connecting a USB or Ethernet cable if you prefer a wired connection versus using Wi-Fi.
Installing the software is even easier. You only have to designate the connection you're using with a single click to start the automatic installation and setup for the drivers and Pantum's scan app. As with other Pantum printers I've tested, the installation worked without problems.
Paper handling for printing is just right for light-duty use in a home office or for schoolwork. The one paper source is a 150-sheet open tray, not a drawer, at the bottom front of the printer, where it's easy to refill or add a few pages of special-purpose paper to the top of the stack when needed.
There's no duplexer for automatically printing two-sided documents, but you can set the driver for manual duplexing, so it will print one side of each page, stop to let you reinsert the stack, and then print the other side. The software shows an animated diagram on the screen to guide the reinsertion, but it proved glitchy in testing. I set the driver for flipping the pages on the long edge when reading, and the animation showed how to reinsert the stack for flipping on the short edge. If you print in duplex only occasionally, you'll should make a note about how to reinsert the pages.
For scanning, the printer offers an 8.7-by-11.7-inch flatbed and a 35-sheet ADF that can handle paper up to legal size. However, there's no way to copy a legal-size page to fit on letter-size paper, which is a common need and one of the potentially frustrating oversights in the firmware. Even though there's a menu option for copying to a larger or smaller size of paper than the original, there's no preset option for legal to letter. And if you use the custom setting, the printer insists on scanning from the flatbed instead of the ADF. On the plus side, there's an option in the scan software for manual two-sided scanning, which few inexpensive AIOs offer.
There's also support for printing from both Android and iOS mobile devices, but getting this to work was tricky. The printed instructions say only to follow the tips in the app for connecting. But the only "tip" the app gave me after it found the printer but couldn't print was that the printer was disconnected, even while the screen clearly showed it was connected. To get the printing to work, I had to first use the phone's Wi-Fi utility to establish the connection, and then let the app connect, as well. Pantum says this issue will be fixed in an update to the app that should be launched in November.
Pantum recommends a monthly duty cycle of 2,000 pages for the printer. Of course, if you don't want to bother with refills more than once a week, the maximum is about 600 pages. Keep in mind that the open front on the tray makes refilling much easier than for printers with paper drawers, however.
As always, the more you expect to print, the more the running cost matters. Pantum offers only one toner cartridge size for the printer, with a rated 1,600-page yield and the option to buy single cartridges or more economical packs of two. The running cost, based on the two-cartridge packs, is 3.4 cents per page. As always, when comparing prices between printers, be sure to focus the initial cost plus the running cost, as we discuss in our article on total cost of ownership.
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