Samsung CLP-300 Color Laser Printer

Well, what do you know! Color laser printers are finally affordable for smaller companies as well. Hell, sure has frozen over!

The Samsung CLP-300 claims to be the world’s smallest laser printer, which you definitely won’t find hard to believe considering that regular color laser printers are big enough to shelter a homeless person. This one, on the other hand, occupies as much desk space as any regular desktop laser printer with it’s 13.4x15.4x10.5 inch body, which makes it especially great for small office use. It weighs 30lbs, but I don’t see how that will affect anyone’s buying decision.

Overall the CLP-300 looks quite elegant (unlike most laser printers) with its friendly and curvaceous design, which won’t look like it’s going to eat you if you insert your hand in the wrong place. It has just one paper loading slot in the form of a tray at the bottom, with no other alternatives for single sheet inserts in case you’re planning on printing on some special paper.

There is just a single stop button on the top, right next to the output tray, along with a light indicator of the printer’s status. There are also four separate LEDs on top, each dedicated to the status of its respective color toner.
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The CLP-300 claims to print in ‘Photo Like’ quality, but our tests showed that the claim was meant to be taken with a pinch of salt. In fact, I’d go as far as advising you never to make the mistake of doing a photo print from this printer, especially if it’s the kind that you would want to preserve for a long time. The reason for this is that the printer is primarily made for document printing, and that’s what it does best.

It handles documents with limited colors and embedded pictures pretty well, but try to take a photo print alone from it and the inconsistent colors will make you repent wasting toner ink. Moreover, the CLP-300 is best used with plain paper. Coated paper didn’t seem to go very well with the printer.

Black and white vector and shape handling was top notch though. It produced the most accurate recreation of our black and white vector test till date, with excellent blacks and accurate recreation of the finest lines and curves. Even the font tests showed good amount of detail till font size 2.

The CLP-300 printed 20 black and white pages in one minute sixteen seconds which is three seconds faster than even the Xerox Phaser laser printer. Color pages took longer with 20 pages printing in a little over four minutes. On an average it took close to fourteen seconds for a color page printout.

But eventually, it all comes down to what you want to use the printer for. No home user would want to make a grand investment in a laser printer anyways, as any inkjet printer will do a great job in those occasional prints for a fraction of the price. It’s the office users who tend to print a lot of documents, who should be looking at this one. At its price of Rs. 14,990 it’s not aimed at the home users anyways.