Samsung has been building inexpensive mono laser printers for some years, but its colour cousins are a more recent introduction and have generally been inexpensive, but a bit bulky.
Its new CLP-300 has been redesigned from the ground up and has a small, neat footprint and interesting printing technology inside.
From the outside, the CLP-300 printer is unspectacular – like a large box with its front edge rounded off and a 150 sheet multipurpose paper tray sticking out from its base.
On the top is a simple control panel, with a single status indicator, a job cancel button and four indicators for toner level. Pull down the front cover and you see where most of the new design work has been done.
Slotted into the front of the print engine are four cylindrical drums of toner. Each is colour-coded and will only fit into its own slot, making maintenance a real doddle. The black toner cartridge should be good for 5,000 text pages, while each of the colour cartridges can produce 1,000 text pages. The drum has a life of 20,000 pages, and a waste toner bottle that needs changing every 5,000 pages.
A black text page costs just under 3p, colour around 11p. Neither figure is extortionate for a colour laser printer costing under £200, so hats off to Samsung for the old trick of recouping the low asking price by stinging customers for ink.
Print speeds are not spectacular, but they're not unduly slow either. We measured around 10 pages per minute (ppm) for black and just under 3.5ppm for colour; surprisingly close to the specified figures.
Unfortunately, print quality is the main area that isn't quite up to scratch. Black print is over heavy, so text looks almost emboldened, while colour, particularly in any photographs, is over-vivid. You can adjust for this to some extent within the printer driver, but it may take some tweaking to get acceptable output. Needless to say, colour lasers aren't suitable for printing high-quality digital photos – you'll need an inkjet for that.
Samsung has produced a small, colour laser printer with nearly everything right. Unfortunately, the one thing that isn't as good as its competitors is the one thing printers are often chosen on – print quality.
HP Color Laserjet 2605dn
Affordable, small and fast printer that is ideal for small businesses
Lexmark C500n
Budget colour laser with built-in networking
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