Samsung CLP-310 Toner Review

You aren't getting extremely quick laser speeds with the Samsung CLP-310 printer, however, it does meet the buildup in providing budget friendly colour laser printing in a small form factor.

Samsung employs talented individuals who are very imaginative with CAD, pencils, rulers and the tensile strengths of plastic and metal materials to create a handful of very great looking electronic products, from tv sets to mobile phones and a whole lot more.

And then there's the CLP-310.

It is a colour laser printer that looks just like the previous mockups for anyone's colour laser printer may perhaps look like, just a bit smaller. This may appear like idle complaining, but then Samsung is the company that produced the extremely appealing ML-1630 Laser Printer. Most probably those design folks have moved on, and what we get is grey and ultimately dull.

This may appear like an odd feature to start with, yet Samsung lists the small size of the CLP-310 as a selling point, and who are we to quibble?

At 388 x 313 x 243mm it is undoubtedly on the smaller end for a colour laser, although the claim that it's small enough to be placed "comfortably on a corner of your home, office, desk or bookcase" is probably a touch optimistic. Unless of course if you have quite large bookshelves, presumably.

If there is a feature that most people look for on a laser printer, it's speed. I'm curious then, that Samsung only rates the CLP-310 at a somewhat slow 16ppm for the black prints and 4pmm for colour. It's really quite a lot more honest compared to the other vendors - particularly Inkjet vendors, which often rate the ppm count at around the rate the printer could spit out blank paper - however it is also not a vote of confidence in what exactly is intended to be among laser's major selling points.

The CLP-310 is connected through a USB 2. only - there is no network port built in, although a tab of plastic on the back points to the potential for this particular framework to accommodate one - and is a printer only. Those people who are after a multifunction device must look elsewhere.