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Samsung targets disgruntled inkjet users with latest colour laser
We were given a hands-on demonstration of Samsung's latest colour laser printer yesterday evening.
In an attempt to persuade home and small-business users to ditch inkjets (and their expensive replacement cartridges), the CLP-300 has an RRP of just £179.99 - for a colour laser, that's pretty darn cheap.
To further entice those who see lasers as expensive, replacement toner is available for around £27 per cartridge.
However, the in order to make them so cheap, Samsung has kept the life of each cartridge (black, cyan, magenta and yellow) to just 1,000 pages at 5% coverage.
As ever, colour prints are way off what you get from an inkjet (even a cheap model), but fine for colour PDF printouts.
We'll be giving the CLP-300 a full test in the coming days.
I look forward to seeing your review. I've been looking for a compact home color laser for some time. My only requirements are that it prints crisp text, consistent color (minimal banding), and decent photos (I have an inkjet for serious photos). From the very few user reviews I've found thus far, the printer could be rated anywhere from mediocre-bordering-on-bad to a solid "good" (I don't expect any "excellent" ratings due to the obvious compromises that had to be made to get the size down).
Posted by Alan Somers | October 17, 2006 8:00 PM
We've now got our review unit in the labs and are currently putting it through its paces.
We'll post our review asap.
Posted by Will Stapley | October 18, 2006 10:40 AM
I've seen a review on Cnet's UK site and they seem to think that it's OK for personal use but not suitable for business purposes. Some of their comments stem from apparent issues with the Windows driver and I'd be curious to hear how the printer does under Mac OS X (my platform of choice) or Linux. I'd also be interested in hearing whether paper quality significantly impacts print quality, since I've also seen a couple of user reviews that slam the printer for color bleeding and that fail to mention whether cheap paper was used.
Posted by Alan Somers | October 26, 2006 8:32 PM