The situation: back in 2009 or thereabouts, I bought a Samsung CLP-620ND color laser printer because it was buckets cheaper than other color lasers at the time, ran relatively fast, and I figured it being a workgroup-class printer, it would last a long time.

Now, it's 2018, and it's indeed still working fine, given our relatively modest demands of it. I've replaced the toner cartridges three times since the originals, and I'm pleased that the aftermarket still offers them at half the price of Samsung-official cartridges with no observable difference in quality.

Yes it's still working fine, but it's still got the circa 2009 firmware on the inside. This suggests the potential for security nasties, although the printer is (hopefully) not poking around through my firewall. I went digging deep into the Interwebs, and so far as I can tell:

- Samsung is somehow outsourcing support for their printers to HP. If you want to find drivers and such, you're getting them from an HP web site.

- The embedded web server in the printer knows how to install new firmware, if you've got a firmware image handy to upload through the browser, but firmware images are not available anywhere on the web. You can find PC/Mac/Linux drivers, but not firmware.

- Well almost. There are commercial firms in weird places (e.g., Romania) that will sell you hacked firmware that disables Samsung's dumb DRM, so you can refill your own toner cartridges. Most any web site you find that talks about firmware is talking about it in the context of resetting the various DRM counters.

- If I still had the ancient install CD (long gone) there's some kind of tool called SPD (Samsung Printer Diagnostics) that's supposed to have its own firmware downloader/installer. I found some weird Korean Samsung site and I'm trying to download a SPD image. That thing is running at a glacial pace (i.e., an hour to download less than 44MB). I'm not confident the thing I might be downloading is in any way relevant to my printer. UPDATE: once that download finally finished, it triggered the Windows Defender malware detector. Sigh.

- Supposedly, newer Samsung variants on this printer understand how to be a Google Cloud Printer. This would be a seriously valuable feature, so my kid can print to it from her Chromebook. I'm instead using the feature where Chrome on my Mac can be a front-end for the whole Cloud Print thing. This doesn't work well at all. I kinda wonder whether Cloud Print works in any other case.

I'm currently leaning toward "leave well enough alone", but I figured if anywhere there was somewhere I could find useful advice, this is the place.