This is the charset used internally by your operating system. The default is UTF-8, which is fine for most systems and covers all characters in all languages. The default in previous Samba releases was to save filenames in the encoding of the clients for example, CP850 for Western European countries.

This is the charset Samba uses to print messages on your screen. It should generally be the same as the unix charset .

This is the charset Samba uses when communicating with DOS and Windows 9x/Me clients. It will talk Unicode to all newer clients. The default depends on the charsets you have installed on your system. Run testparm -v | grep "dos charset" to see what the default is on your system.