Review: Samsung CLP-300 Color Laser Printer

I tend to use a printer in “short bursts”: Typically I’ll print a lot of text-only pages at the beginning of each college term or when I’m printing essay drafts. The rest of the time I’ll only print the occasional letter or card. But inevitably whenever I do need to print something, the ink in my Epson inkjet printer would be empty or have dried up. 

I recently discovered Samsung’s affordable color laser printer, the CLP-300 and as my Epson had started to chew up anything I’d try to print, I snapped it up. Here’s some of my experiences with it now after using it for a few weeks:

Size, looks and other physical characteristics

This is easily the smallest color laser I’ve ever come across before and it fits quite comfortably on the shelf of my Ikea desk-legs. It looks – well, a bit boring like most printers, but at least the paper tray doesn’t protrude very much. 

The printer is very quiet: You can hear it when it’s printing, but it’s not nearly loud enough to be annoying. The rest of the time it’s silent (as expected).

Getting started

Setting it up was a breeze and apart from a bit of toner dust that was floating about in the packaging of the magenta toner fairly hassle-free.

The printer comes with OS X drivers that use the typical ViseX installer (seriously – why does it always need to launch several separate installer applications?). As well as adding drivers, the installer also adds Samsung’s Smart Panel utility that lets you access options such as supply levels, print quality, and manual color adjustment.

One caveat: Smart Utility automatically adds itself to your menu bar and automatically starts when you login. But I don’t print that often and access my printer settings fairly rarely, so I’d prefer to launch it on a as required. However the utility is not in my Startup items and so far I haven’t actually found how I can prevent it from automatically launching.

Print Speed & Quality

A fair number of reviews on the internet point out that this is a 4-pass printer and therefore its color prints are a bit slower than other color lasers. But it’s more than fast enough for my requirements and I suspect the complaints mainly come from people using this printer in small businesses or home offices.

It’s also been pointed out that the color image quality isn’t as good as with comparable inkjet printers in the same price range. That is definitely the case, but having said that, photos printed with this printer looked fine and were more than good enough for things such as birthday cards, presentation graphics etc.

One adjustment I did make was to manually reduce  the color levels for all colors to “-6″. Lots of other reviews mentioned that the colors were quite over-saturated at the default settings and I noticed the same issue. But with the manual adjustment the colours look fine.

Here’s a sample print. As you can (hopefully) see, the text is very clear and crisp, whilst the color images are a little bit washed out. But the quality is generally not bad at all.

Cost

I paid €180,- for this printer and will hopefully soon receive €50,- back through Samsung’s cashback offer. The printer comes with “starter” toner cartridges that will last about half as long as the regular consumables (roughly 1000 black prints and 500 for each of the 3 color cartridges). A complete set of new cartridges will cost around €80,-. But for my casual needs, the included cartridges will hopefully last us quite some time and I don’t have to worry about them drying out, which frequently happened with my previous Inkjet printer. 

Conclusion

This is a great printer for home users who are looking for something with a bit more affordable consumables than most inkjets offer who don’t need to print huge amounts or photos.

View this printer at Amazon.