Samsung CLP-510 review

Until recently, all but those with the most generous budgets had to content themselves with a monochrome laser printer - a dowdy choice in comparison to the vibrant photo prints offered by budget inkjets.

This year, though, the price of colour lasers has plummeted. In our April 2005 issue, we looked at Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2400W and Epson's Aculaser C1100 - both decent choices under £260. The CLP-510 is Samsung's riposte.

The CLP-510 is easy to set up. Its four toner cartridges drop into separate slots at the front, and the belt used to transfer toner on to the paper must be unlocked before use. All that remains is to connect the printer via USB 2, and to install the driver software.

The Samsung's input tray holds 250 sheets of A4 paper, and has an additional 100-sheet multi-purpose input tray. It uses a black toner cartridge plus three coloured toners (cyan, magenta and yellow). Standard versions of these cartridges last for a claimed 2,000 pages each (3,000 for the black). High-capacity versions will cut the long-term cost of printing, and have a lifespan of 5,000 pages (7,000 pages for the black). Using high-capacity cartridges, mono pages cost 1.05p each. Colour pages cost around 4.8p - slightly less than those of the Epson, and close to those of the Konica Minolta.

Samsung claims 6 pages per minute (ppm) in colour, 25ppm in mono. In tests, the CLP-510 produced colour pages at a rate of 5.6ppm.

Our mono test prints shot out at a speedy 22.6ppm, but text appeared soft around the edges, making it tiring to read after a while.

On the plus side, the Samsung does offer fast double-sided (duplex) printing, producing our 50-page test document in 4 minutes 55 seconds on 25 sheets of paper.

The CLP-510's colour output is bettered by that of Epson's Aculaser C1100. If you don't need double-sided printing, go for with the Epson.