Product Reviews

Over the past few months we've seen several new budget colour laser printers. The four-pass CLP-510 is the most recent model from Samsung. Although it's priced to compete with Konica Minolta's entry-level Magicolor 2400W and Epson's Aculaser C1100, it's well specified.

The Samsung has great paper handling that includes automatic duplex printing. Its regular paper cassette holds 250 sheets and is supplemented by a 100-sheet multipurpose tray. However, the unadventurous user may never find this because it is hidden away at the base of the right-hand panel.

The CLP-510 is big but reasonably easy to set up. It has no carousel, so each toner drops neatly into its own slot at the front. All that remains is to remove some transit locks from the preinstalled transfer belt and lock it back into place. Installing the host-based driver is quick and easy.

Colour lasers are more complex than their mono cousins and have more consumables.

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The CLP-510's four toners, imaging drum, transfer belt and waste toner bottle are all replaceable, but the availability of a 7,000-page black toner should help increase service intervals when printing in mono. Using high-capacity supplies, each mono page should cost 1.69p, and colour pages around 7.75p which is on a par with the competition.

The CLP-510 came close to its rated speeds in our tests, making it a quick printer for the money. Its 5.6ppm performance on our mixed-colour test was impressive, but it lagged marginally behind the AcuLaser C1100; see our Hotlist on page 28.

The printer's 22.6ppm performance on both mono text documents was speedy, but we were not happy with the quality. Text outlines were so soft, our eyes tired quickly from struggling to focus on it.

Without any magnification, characters appeared similar to those from HP's LaserJet 1022 or Kyocera Mita's FS-720 (see our Labs test on page 195). However, when magnified under an eyeglass we saw that outlines appeared delicately diffused, as though intentionally dithered.

We tested the Samsung's duplex performance using our Alice In Wonderland document. It printed all 50 pages in four minutes and 55 seconds on 25 sheets of paper, equivalent to 10.2 single-sided pages per minute.

Though good, the CLP-510's colour output was easily surpassed by prints from the AcuLaser. This printer has more paper inputs, but where duplex isn't essential we'd recommend the AcuLaser for its faster mono prints and excellent print quality.