Samsung CLP-300N review

Samsung says the CLP-300N is the smallest colour laser in its class, and we've certainly never seen a smaller one. It's also lighter and quieter than any other printer in this group, so it's well suited for use in the home.

We reviewed the standard version of this printer in What's New, Shopper January 2007. This network model is the most affordable printer with an Ethernet port here. We plugged it into our Labs network and selected the typical network installation in Samsung's excellent install program, which detected and installed the printer before prompting us for a test page. The only tricky part of the process was working out how to extend the printer's single adjustable paper tray to A4 paper size.

Although its noise rating is only one decibel less than those of other printers here, the CLP-300N seems much quieter when printing colour and mono pages. This may be partly due to its relaxed speed. It has the most leisurely mono print speed of any four-pass printer here, and was the slowest overall when printing in colour. We noticed that it was particularly slow when printing our high-resolution test photos, taking nearly two and-a-half minutes to produce six 6x4in prints on three A4 pages.

The CLP-300N produced decent-quality black text, but under magnification we could see that outlines were less crisp than we would like. Its colour prints weren't particularly impressive. The outlines of solid colours, such as coloured headline text, seemed poorly focused where different colours weren't quite aligned. Smaller grey and coloured fonts seemed granular and were a little hard to read.

Many of our test photos appeared somewhat washed out. Our black-and-white photo and a couple of our regular tests printed with far too much contrast and we noticed a lack of subtlety in some areas of dark shading.