Samsung CLP-500 review

Sub-£500 colour laser printers have been trickling onto the market for a year now, but the low price is invariably achieved by cutting corners. With the CLP-500, Samsung includes some of the professional features left out of the low-end competition, but keeps the price pleasingly low.

The unit is similar in size to other entry-level colour lasers, if perhaps a little heavier, and attractively designed in a simple cubic form. Paper is fed from a 250-sheet cassette, which fits flush inside the case, inserted from the front in a conventional manner. A 100-sheet multipurpose tray can be flipped open on the right-hand side, and all printouts are delivered to the top of the printer. The CLP-500 incorporates an internal duplexer for two-sided printing, which works well, although we'd like to have seen a hardware duplex button on the machine in addition to being hidden in the software drivers.

Colour toner cartridges are loaded into the left-hand side of the unit. These cartridges are slab-style boxes fitted like drawers in a stack arrangement. Loading the toners is a little fiddly, because you need to align the drawers in a very particular manner, but it's relatively mess-free compared with some other colour lasers. The transfer belt, imaging drum, fuser and waste-toner bottle are all replaceable separately. In principle, this stack arrangement should enable faster colour printing since the toners can be pressed onto the transfer belt in parallel rather than sequentially. In practice, this isn't the case, with colour printing rated at 5ppm as opposed to mono printing at 20ppm.

One area in which Samsung has cut corners to keep the price low is the number of ports - all you get are USB and parallel ports. However, Samsung has ensured a network upgrade path is available, letting you add an optional Ethernet port and even an 802.11b wireless connection.

Navigating printer menus on the unit itself is easy thanks to a sensible button layout and a two-line LCD status window. The buttons are metallic and sit flush with the surface of the case, enhancing a feeling of good-quality design and construction.

Print performance stands up to Samsung's claims, more or less. Our test print of 20 copies of a black-only Excel spreadsheet took just over a minute to complete, for example, while printing the same job again with coloured text took just over four minutes. Graphics printing is fast too, with an A4 hi-res colour photo completing in 33 seconds at 600dpi, and 57 seconds at 1,200dpi class. Print quality is good. It's just the ticket for everyday office duties in mono and colour alike, but closer examination reveals some limitations. Tiny text and details start to fill in, while colours lack saturation.

Samsung has made a big deal of price comparisons with competitive entry-level lasers, and this is where the CLP-500's key advantage lies. You can buy an HP Color Laserjet 1500L for less, but it won't hold as much paper, do duplexing, allow a network upgrade, or necessarily produce output to the CLP-500 standard.

Author: Alistair Dabbs