Today I finally went out and bought the Samsung ML-1610 laser printer. The printer itself came in at P3,575 after a little discount from the nice folks at Electroworld. Then I had to go buy a USB cable because, well, the printer didn't come with one. Talk about cost-cutting! No biggie, though, as the cable only cost P30 at CD-R King.
The USB interface to the ML-1610 is a Type B, so I needed a cable with Type A on one side for my laptop and Type B for the other. In the picture on the side (via Wikipedia), Type A is on the left and Type B is on the right.
There was a Linux driver that came with the installation CD, but in the end, I found it unnecessary and even just plain bothersome. The Samsung driver didn't really add anything new to what the ML-1610 driver that already came with Ubuntu.
I think I also figured out what went wrong with the printer last night at Jameson's place. It seems that the printer can't properly convert color to grayscale, and it's at this point that it just pukes. If it wasn't so cheap, I'd feel ripped off, but considering the price I got it at, I'm willing to work around its limitations.