Normally I am not the greatest Samsung fan after my little episode with its P10 laptop, but here is my story for this.
Being a graphic design student, I needed a printer that would print out designs on just about any sort of paper quickly and beautifully. I'm glad that CLP-300 didn't disappoint me...not yet anyway.
Being the world's smallest colour laser printer, and winning the reddot design award in 2006, I really had hoped for something not to disappoint.
Initially, it was definitely the price that caught my attention to this printer; as cheap as around £130 or so and you can already get CLP-300, this machine looks very simple and built from ground to make this printer so low-cost. Not to mention other attractions such as OSX-compatibility (woohoo!) ...
With a lift handle at the side it makes things a little easier when you want to move it about your room to print something else. Being the lightest colour
laser printer in the world you don't really have much of an excuse not to help your friend print something.
The machine looks so simple you almost wouldn't believe that it can do a lot when you look at it at first. This printer has a 150-sheet tray that projects from the bottom of the front panel, with a fold-out paper support when the printed pages are to be fed out from the top surface to prevent pages sliding off. You can print from small 3x5 cards to legal-size sheets (the tray can expand in order to compliment that). If you want to manually feed single sheets, you can flip open the translucent plastic cover at the front of the tray and insert pages one at a time (Of course for that to happen, you will have to take out any paper that is in the tray first).
You won't notice anything special about this printer until you open the front cover to see that the interior designing of this printer is incorporating new designs to grab that reddot award; all you can see when you open the cover is 4 toner containers, each of these tubes is probably about the size of a can of coca-cola, which can be easily fitted into the slots without any powder falling all over the place. All those tubes looks very smart and snugly fitted into the colour co-ordinated slots. Even the toner containers look modern and sleek! And at the left hand side of the containers, there is an L-shaped toner waste bottle which is a consumable object, as well as the toner cylinders. Rather environmentally friendly for those that support helping reduce technological wastage. =D
The simple control panel which is located next to the page feeds has 4 toner indicators and one status light to show the power and the levels of toner still available, which next to the status light is a round orange button allowing you to stop your print job. If you want to make any more changes, you would have to use the Smart Panel which will be installed onto your PC when you connect the printer, which is included with a CD upon purchase. Apart from that, there's not really much else that's included with the purchase.
There is one USB socket that allows you to connect the printer to your PC, located at the back. (CLP-300N also includes an Ethernet socket, but that printer costs around £40-50 more than this)
Printing speed: given the cost of this printer, it's not particularly surprising that it has a relatively slower printing speed compared to other more expensive colour laser printers. Black text is of course, quicker than colour prints since only one drum has to be loaded. So far the print quality is good and haven't seen any flaws in the prints yet. Colour prints aren't bad either, though remarkably slower; it was fine for colour designs for a student like myself. But for those that want fast and good quality prints you may have to fish out more cash from your pocket to achieve that.
Manufacturer Support: There is a one year warranty that is provided along with the product, which is pretty average compared to other warranties other companies can offer. 24/7 Telephone support is also available, but when they have a website that offers FAQs that can answer your questions such as how to connect the printer to a network, and the different types of paper can be used for this, Samsung also offers a Download Centre that has user manuals, printer drivers, software and more, those annoying hold-the-line MIDI music can be halted for the mean time.
Overall, if you want relatively good prints for a bargain price printer, this is the one for you, otherwise, I'd advise to pay more.
Below is just some specifications from Samsung if you would like to know some technical aspects of this printer:
Speed(B/W): Up to 16 ppm in A4
Speed(Color): Up to 4 ppm in A4 (4 ppm in Letter)
Resolution: Up to 2,400 x 600 dpi effective output
First Print Out Time (B/W): 14 seconds
First Print Out Time (Color) : 26 seconds
Processor: Samsung CHORUSm 300 MHz
Memory 32 MB (Max. 32 MB)
Emulation SPL-C (Samsung Printer Language Color)
Interface USB 2.0
Fonts Windows fonts
Color Profile ICC Technology
OS Compatibility Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003, Various Linux OS including Red Hat 8.0~9.0, Mandrake 9.2~10.1, SuSE 8.2~9.2 and Fedora Core 1~3, Mac OS X 10.3~10.4
Happy buying! =)
This product has not yet been reviewed.
17.07.2007 11:14
Lots of useful info, clearly set out - very good review! David
17.07.2007 10:35
Great review
16.07.2007 18:03
a very nice review of yours!!