Samsung CLP-300 review

Colour laser printers are normally big and heavy, and make plenty of noise.

It's not always easy to find room for them on a desktop, and they can prove a distraction in a quiet home office. They're usually expensive, too. Samsung's CLP-300 looks like a welcome exception. It's the same size and shape as your average entry-level mono laser, but it can print both mono and colour pages.

Like many other Samsung laser printers, the CLP-300 is made from drab grey plastic. It stores paper in a covered 150-sheet input tray that projects from the front. There's no manual feed slot, though, so you'll need to unload your stock of plain paper if you want to print an envelope or any other special media. Printed pages collect in a short output tray on top of the printer, with a wide flip-up stop to help keep things tidy.

For a colour laser, the CLP-300 is particularly easy to set up. Toner is supplied in small, round canisters that fit into keyed slots in the printer a bit like a child's block puzzle. The canisters are much smaller than typical toners, so there's much less plastic waste to recycle, but they also have a low page yield. Each black toner should last for 2,000 pages, but each colour toner lasts for just 1,000 pages.

Alhough all the printer's consumables are easy to replace, the CLP-300 isn't particularly cheap to run. Colour pages are expensive, costing 10.5p per page. Cheap mono costs are usually one of the main benefits of a laser printer, but the CLP-300 is a little disappointing. In fact, an economical inkjet such as HP's DeskJet 5940 will print a page of black text for less. Even if you never print enough to need a new photoconductor drum (the cost of which we've included in our graphs below) each mono page will cost around 1.7p, and each page of colour about 8.5p.

The CLP-300 is a four-pass colour printer, so it has to create four separate page images. When you print in colour, you get only a quarter of the printer's mono speed. As the printer has a modest 16ppm mono speed, colour pages can be dished out at a maximum of 4ppm. That said, it's still a lot quicker than most inkjet printers. It came close to its rated speeds in our timed print tests, and was quick to begin printing from standby. The first copy of our formal letter appeared after a reasonable 13.5 seconds.

Most colour laser printers we've reviewed sound rather industrial, with loud clunks and whirring accomanying every colour page. The CLP-300 is the opposite, and is the quietest colour printer we've ever reviewed. As such, it's a good choice for a home office where a loud printer would be very noticeable.

Text from this printer looked dark black and crisp to the naked eye, though under magnification we could see slightly soft, diffuse outlines to each character. You'd have to really look for these problems, though, and for letters and other documents you're unlikely to have a big problem with the quality of the output. There was more of a problem in the printer's colour output, which appeared unfocused, making some fine coloured text hard to read. Colour in large, headline text seemed slightly uneven, with a noticeable darkening at the bottom of certain red characters. The colours in graphics and illustrations seemed a little over-bright, athough photos appeared more natural.

The CLP-300 is the most affordable colour laser we've reviewed. The cost to run a printer should be a big factor in your choice, however, and many of the CLP-300's competitors produce prints that are cheaper and higher quality. That said, the CLP-300 is incredibly easy to set up and maintain. It's also the smallest colour laser that we've reviewed. If you haven't got much space and have modest printing needs, this is an inconspicuous, quick colour printer for the home.