Last week I acquired a Samsung CLP-300 color laser printer. I bought it brand new, still in sealed box, for $99, local-pickup at the seller's house so no shipping charges. It was an eBay sale.

You can actually buy these printers cheaper than that at Amazon.com, but when you add in the $30 shipping charges, it would come to about $15 more than I paid.

The printer is adequate. It wouldn't be suitable for printing high quality photographs, but for the kind of printing I do it is acceptable. I've attached a photo that I printed with the printer, then scanned back in so it is a third generation picture (Camera-->Jpg-->Printer-->Scanner-->Resized-->Attached). Quality is adequate.

Samsung claims a 24,000 monthly duty cycle but the reviews I've seen suggest that might be hopelessly optimistic. Again, for my printing needs, irrelevant. A big month might be 200 pages for me.

It runs at 16ppm B&W, 4ppm color, and toner cost per page runs about 2.5 cents per page if your printing is text with color graphics, as opposed to full color prints which of course would run more. For total cost per page, add in another 3/4 cent per page for the drum kit (good for 15,000 pages) and you're looking at between 3 and 3.5 cents per page total. For a <$100 printer, that isn't too bad. If you want to scare yourself, tally up your cost per page on a typical low-end ink-jet printer!

Anybody have any first-hand experience with the CLP-300?

tanstaafl.

Not bad for $99! I have a Lexmark C522 which prints about as well although much faster. The problem is there seems to be something wrong with this one in that it wastes toner. I'm consistently getting 160 pages of 2.5 percent coverage out of a 3000 page at 5 percent coverage cartidge.

While the unit was under warranty Lexmark replaced the cartridges, but only after dealing with Indian tech support for many hours. Now that it's out of warranty I imagine I'm out of luck.

Maybe I need to look into the one of those Korean units.

Stu

I have exactly this printer, which I bought last summer for $180 via Costco, except mine says "Xerox Phaser 6100" on the front. So far as I can tell, they're absolutely the same printer. Thanks to the built-in Ethernet, I've got it in a hall closet around the corner, where it's using a different electrical circuit than the one in my office. No more lights dimming when the printer warms itself up.

Like you, I use this thing rarely, but when I use it, I'm very happy to have it. Color is excellent for printing Google maps and the like, but I wouldn't use it for photos. The only thing to take care with is printing PDFs that use greyscale. The printer tries to render the greyscale values with the color toner rather than the black & white toner. Not only does it look funny, but it also takes longer to print. As such, if you're printing something that uses greyscale and you want speed, tell your printer driver to switch to black&white mode.

Amusement: the printer has a web admin interface. You can set a password if you like, but so far as I can tell, it never actually asks you for the password subsequent to that. This printer really needs to be kept behind a firewall...

It looks like the CLP-300 doesn't have ethernet, but that's not to say they didn't include a space for it for other companies to put into their rebranded printers.

I've been really impressed with Samsung's printers over the past several years. For at least 4 years now they've pioneered the inexpensive laser printer market. They may not have the greatest features or print quality, but they're great little machines with decent build quality.

My printer philosophy: never buy all-in-ones and never buy inkjets. It goes without saying that you should never buy a combination of the two. HP makes great hardware, but they have the most terrible software I've ever seen. I've installed three Photosmart printers for different people now, and the process takes at least 30 minutes, is prone to failing and thus never installing completely, and even if everything goes smoothly the software is still buggy and the printers often report as disconnected. Ugh.

In contrast, I have a sub-$100 B&W Samsung laserjet that I got two years ago (it was under $100 even back then), and I've never had any problems with it.

The only criticism I have for these Samsung laserjets is when the toner runs out. AFAIC, you have to get the name-brand replacement toner, and that usually costs upwards of $70, or almost as much as getting a whole new printer (certainly far more than the printer is worth now).

So thank you, Doug. If/when the toner on my printer runs out, I'll definitely take a look at the CLP-300.

My only concern with the Samsung/Xerox printer is that the 4-color toner comes in four funny round barrels that you screw into the front of the machine. I'll bet, once these printers are replaced with the next best thing, your ability to buy the toner will be nil. Of course, by then I may be keen to get the nextest-bestest replacement printer. My fear is that the razor blade pricing model of giving away cheap printers with overpriced ink may find its way from inkjets over to laser printers. My ancient HP Deskjet, purchased in 1999, worked faithfully for me until I got my laser printer in 2007. It's unclear you'll get that kind of lifetime out of newer ones.

The trick they use with a lot of the newer printers is that the cartridge you get included isn't a full capacity one.

CLP-300N
http://www.samsung.com/au/consumer/detai...cd=CLP-300N/XSA

I looked into that before I bought the printer. Cost per page is one of my hot buttons, and I found the cost for toner on the CLP 300 to be reasonable -- usually around $55 (including shipping) for a complete four-toner set good for about 2,000 pages, or individual colors for about $18 each ($21 for black). If (as Dan Wallach points out further down) toner becomes difficult or expensive to find, my total exposure on this printer is less than $100 so I'm not losing too much sleep over it, or stocking up on toner now while its still available. The toner that came with the printer (2/3 capacity of new toner bottles) will last me for a year at the rate I use it -- so far I've printed about 20 pages, including this one (actual CLP-300 print scanned with Fujitsu FI-5120C). Mostly I was tired of having to save my files to a flash drive and walk across the room to SWMBO's Macintosh in order to print the occasional spreadsheet or what-have-you on her USB printer.

$55 for a complete toner kit seems practically free to me after dealing with the giant HP color laser printer in my [former] office. That one cost over $1200 to resupply, but of course it gave far more prints on a batch of toner. Still, the cost per page was about what the Samsung's is, although the print speed was at least six or seven times faster, and print quality was better.

One of the pluses for me with the Samsung was that they don't follow the HP practice of combining the toner and the drum in one disposable unit. Upside: Toner costs are greatly reduced. Downside: As the drum wears out, print quality degrades. But at least the option is mine to decide when to replace the drum (~$100). I always hated having to replace perfectly good HP drums just because toner was low.

So far my experience with the Samsung is good, but with only about 20 pages printed it could hardly be called definitive.

tanstaafl.