Review: Samsung CLP-300 laser printer

In many four-pass designs, four toner cartridges are fitted into a drum mechanism that rotates each toner colour into place in turn. Installing toner cartridges in these printers requires the drum to be rotated to the correct position before each coloured toner can be inserted or removed.

In the CLP-300 the toner cartridges remain fixed in position. This gives you direct and very easy access to the cartridges for installation and comes with the added benefit of fewer moving parts, improved performance and greatly reduced operating noise.

In a printer of such small proportions there’s not a lot of room for toner - and the CLP-300’s toner cartridges are really tiny. The black cartridge is the largest of the four and the size of a small teacup while the remaining three colour cartridges are smaller still.

While smaller cartridges mean more frequent replacements, they do give the printer a friendlier feel. They’re very easy to install and are rather reminiscent of a child’s toy - you just pick them up by the built-in handle and push them into place in the correct hole.

At five per cent coverage, cartridge yields are 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 pages each for cyan, magenta and yellow. A waste toner collector must be replaced every 5,000 mono or 1,250 colour pages and the imaging unit is good for 20,000 pages.

Each colour cartridge costs £26, while the larger black cartridge costs £31. If you buy all four at once you can save money and buy a multi-pack for £88. The waste toner collector costs £5 and when the time comes to replace the imaging unit it will set you back £99.

These prices are reasonable for a low-cost colour laser, but if you’re planning on printing a lot of pages we’d recommend stepping up to a larger printer with cheaper toner in larger-capacity cartridges.

Image quality, while acceptable, is nothing special. Laser printers simply can’t compete with modern inkjets when it comes to printing photos and, considering the CLP-300’s target market, we feel it’s fair to make this comparison. When printing other types of document, we’ve certainly seen better results from more expensive laser printers, but the output of the CLP-300 is satisfactory at this price.

Also available is the CLP-300N which adds a network port and support for printing from Windows NT 4.0.

Being so small and with such a low RRP, the Samsung CLP-300 will no doubt appeal to home users, but if you're looking to regularly print large documents the slow speed and low-capacity toners will probably force you to look elsewhere.

Also consider:
OKI C3300n
A fast alternative to a laser printer for small workgroups and home users

Brother MFC-8860DN
Fax, copy, print and colour scanning combined in a laser multifunction device

Dell Laser 1110
A mono laser for under £100 but the starter toner cartridge is disappointingly small

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