Product ReviewsPrinters
Samsung bills this machine as 'the smallest colour laser printer in the world' and there can be little argument with that. Not much bigger than a mid-range, personal, mono laser, it really does have a very small footprint - just 388 x 313mm. Although the paper tray projects from the front of the printer to increase the footprint slightly, the tray's top cover is translucent, so you can see at a glance how much paper is left in the 150-sheet tray. The printer is decked out entirely in frosted and high-gloss black, and there's a strange, gloss-black 'spoiler' on top, which helps guide pages out onto its top surface. It looks as if the design is used to reduce the apparent height of the machine and it certainly makes it look different from most other small colour lasers. The control panel is pretty simple, with four LEDs to show when each of the toner cartridges runs low and another couple to indicate error conditions. The single control button is used to cancel a current job and to start the second half of a manual duplex print. There's no duplexer provided with the CLP-315, and neither is one available as an option. There's no multi-purpose feed, either. The only option is a second 150-sheet tray, which fits under the printer. There is, however, an alternative version of the machine: the CLP-315W, which has both Ethernet and wifi connections, as well as a standard USB socket on the back. That model will set you back an extra £75 or so, and isn't yet easy to track down in the UK, although things may have improved by the time you read this. Pull down the front panel of the printer and you can see the four toner cartridges lined up one above the other and with little flip-down coloured toggles at each end, so you can remove them easily.
Software doesn't stretch further than a driver, but this is quite well endowed, with support for watermarks, overlays and multiple pages per sheet. There are instructions for manual duplexing, too. Manufacturer's print speeds are usually blatantly over-optimistic. Samsung quotes 17 pages per minute (ppm) for black print and 4ppm for colour. On our 20-page test document, we saw 13ppm, which isn't bad, but on a more typical five-page test, it dropped to just over 9ppm. That's without the 20-second warm-up needed if the printer is in sleep mode, which will be most of the time in a typical home or small office setting. A five-page colour text and graphics print gave a speed of 3.4ppm. Black text print is quite acceptable for an entry-level laser. It's reasonably crisp and densely black. It's not quite so good when printed over colour, though, showing some spatter and poor registration; you can see a white halo to the characters. Photo prints, never a strong point in a colour laser, aren't brilliant - well, actually they're a bit too brilliant, with colours over-emphasised and some banding apparent. Each toner cartridge is rated at 1000 pages, except the black, which lasts 1500 pages. These aren't high capacities for a laser printer and when you look at the prices - we searched the usual suspects for the best deal - we calculate page costs of 3.3p for mono and 11.8p for colour. Neither of these are particularly good, but then the purchase price is exceptionally low for a colour laser, so we guess Samsung has to make money somewhere. This printer is good in parts. It's small, easy to maintain, quiet when printing and costs very little for colour laser technology. Against this, it's slow, expensive to run and the print quality is better elsewhere. It's a good buy for general home office work, as long as you don't need top-quality colour graphics, and is excellent for straight black text. It would also sit well on a small business desktop or even on a manager's desk, for the occasional colour document. By Simon Williams
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