Review: Samsung CLP-300 laser printer

With a desktop footprint similar to that of an inkjet printer, the CLP-300 will fit just about anywhere and can be installed in a home environment without dominating a smaller-sized room.

It has a fully covered, 150 sheet paper tray. This protects your paper from dust and will accept a variety of paper types and sizes, including regular A4 sheets, envelopes, postcards and transparencies.

The paper tray has an innovative telescopic design that allows you to convert it to various paper sizes by expanding and contracting it into different configurations.

In terms of ease of use, the paper tray is undoubtedly the most complex part of the printer. Everything else about it has been made very simple, from initial setup to driver configuration and troubleshooting.

On opening the box, the first thing you’ll see is Samsung’s large, easy set-up guide which shows you wordlessly how to install and configure the printer in a few easy steps. All you have to do is remove some packing materials, pop in the toner cartridges and let the automated software installation do its thing.

At the end of the hardware setup, the CLP-300 will automatically print out a congratulatory page telling you everything is working and asking you to wait about a minute and a half for the printer to become ready.

Being a four-pass printer, the CLP-300 takes four times as long to print a colour page as it does a monochrome one, so while mono pages pop out at a reasonable 16ppm (pages per minute), colour ones slow down to, at most, 4ppm, which by today’s standards is quite slow. First page out time is 14 seconds, but this increases to 26 seconds when printing in colour.

Being a budget printer, you don’t get a fancy control panel or LCD. Instead, you get one LED indicator for each toner colour, a stop button and a changing-colour status LED. All other printer communication takes place via the pop-up status panel, provided with the driver software.

Here you will find information on remaining toner, as well as a quick link to order replacements online. Should a paper jam occur, instructions also appear via a pop-up. During testing we found that removing printed sheets before a long job had completed could easily trip the paper jam sensor, causing us to have to go through the motions of clearing a non-existent jam before printing could continue.

The driver software is very easy to use; simple without ever becoming patronising, yet with many flexible printer options that you can save in your own named configurations.