Samsung CLX-2160N review

Samsung claims that its CLX-2160N is the smallest colour laser MFP available.

With a footprint of just 413x353mm, it's certainly compact. Despite its size, though, it includes a 150-sheet paper cartridge and an output tray with a capacity of 100 sheets.

The CLX-2160N costs little more than a dedicated colour laser printer, but it includes a network port as well as a USB Hi-Speed port. Full control of the scanner is available only via a USB connection, although you can scan directly to a USB storage device plugged into the MFP's dedicated USB port.

The CLX-2160N was easy to set up. It comes with drivers for Windows Me, XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.3 upwards and several Linux distributions, including recent versions of Red Hat/Fedora and SUSE.

The printer's mono and colour print speeds weren't particularly fast for a laser, but they were close to the printer's rated speeds of 16ppm for mono pages and 4ppm for colour. Mono text was sharp, dark and well-defined even at draft quality. Greyscale reproduction was clear and accurately captured fine gradations of shading. Print quality on solid blocks of colour was rich and intense.

Photos were printed quickly, but the quality wasn't very good. The CLX-2160N produced dense, high-contrast images, but these were marred by a slight pink tone, which was particularly visible on lighter colours. Our high-resolution photo print test produced images with visible graininess, particularly in light areas, and the text from our mixed-colour print test wasn't as sharp as we would have liked.

The CLX-2160N does reasonably well as a standalone copier. It produced a mono copy in less than 17 seconds and a colour copy in 43 seconds. Copy quality was sharp and accurate, particularly on colour copies, but mono text and image reproduction was a little too dark, although it was still clear.

Scanning proved somewhat problematic when we connected over a network. We were unable to control the scanner directly from our graphics program and had to use the Samsung controller software to specify a program to scan to. It was then possible to perform the scan using the MFP's own controls, outputting to our chosen program. When we used the USB connection, we experienced no such problem.

The scanner's colour reproduction is excellent. Both white and black tones were scanned without acquiring any unusual colour tint. Our only complaint was that high-resolution photo scans produced images with visible grain at full magnification. Scan speeds are fast, at 23 seconds for a 300x300dpi A4 scan, and just under 19 seconds for a 600x600dpi 8x6in photo scan. With a maximum optical scan resolution of 1,200 x 600dpi, this MFP is suitable only for office-based tasks, as high-resolution scanning is not possible.

Toner cartridges are easy to install and replace. The CLX-2160N comes with a black starter cartridge with enough toner for around 1,500 pages, and colour cartridges with enough toner for around 700 pages.

The cost of colour printing is quite expensive, but mono costs are very competitive. However, you need to consider the cost of the imaging unit (£99), which lasts for around 20,000 mono pages and 12,500 colour pages. The waste toner container (£32) also needs replacing every 5,000 mono pages and 1,250 colour pages.

The CLX-2160N is cheap to buy, performs most tasks well and produces results that are good enough for most office uses. For light use it's great value, but if you print a lot of pages the cost of the imaging unit and waste toner container make it expensive to run.