Samsung CLP-315W Colour Laser Printer Review

I don’t work for samsung, but i am start to built up quite a collection of samsung branded toys… 2 x samsung 20″ monitors, a 32″ samsung LCD TV, samsung nc10 netbook and now a samsung colour laser printer. The thing is, i don’t favour one brand over another.. i don’t deliberately go out to buy samsung, i just end up with their stuff because they usually work out as best value for money.

Like choosing a TV and dual monitors, i put thought in to this printer. Lots of it. I wanted a colour laser printer and the samsung lured me in mainly because of it’s price tag and wifi feature. Today, it arrived in the post and here’s a few ‘unboxing’ pics…

More pictures on my flickr photostream. I used to think unboxing videos and pictures were pretty stupid but then i realized they’re actually pretty clever… they act as proof of what’s in the box plus they help you put things back together again if necessary. If you throw out the boxes and papers like i do, you can also pick up numbers and bar codes etc… which may come in handy some day if something goes wrong… Anyway on to the review…

Weight

It’s the first thing you’ll noticed. This thing is heavy. A lot heavier than it looks.

Looks

For a laser printer, it’s remarkably small. In fact it’s probably less bulky than my old inkjet printer and certainly takes up less room on my desk. Although colour isn’t that important, the black looks well and blends in nicely with my black monitors, black keyboard, black mousemat, black speakers, black TV etc… Everything seems to be black these days or else i subconsciously buy black stuff for some reason.

Set Up

After reading dozens of reviews on amazon and blogs, the main problem people had was installation. Using wifi. I suppose for the average man on the street it’s tough to wrap your head around IP addresses and understanding the difference between static and dynamic or understanding why it matters… i’ll soon have a degree in this stuff so there’d be something seriously wrong if i couldn’t set this up properly 🙂

In short, you need to give the printer a static IP address. I won’t explain step by step because i’m not Samsung support and i don’t want to bore most of my readers. However i will explain why you need a static IP address. Your wireless router is set to assign IP address dynamically (DHCP) which means it changes every 24 hours or something like that. So lets say you just leave the printer with a dynamic address (default). It’ll be fine for 24 hours but after that, your PC won’t be able to connect because it will be searching for an IP address that existed yesterday but doesn’t exist today.

So it’s a bit like you giving me your phone number and then you changing your number tomorrow without telling me. Obviously i’m gonna try calling your old number and won’t be able to get through. That’s the communication problem your PC and printer will have.

So if you set up a static address, that’s it set up for the life of your wireless router. You won’t need to fiddle with it ever again and can safely connect multiple PCs to your printer without problems. After loading the CD that comes with this printer, you need to hook up your printer manually to a PC (i know that doesn’t make much sense if you want to connect wirelessly, but just do it to start off), then select a ‘wireless’ option and connect to your wireless network. Of course you’ll need to know the name of your network (SSID) and the password to get access to it. If you don’t know that, give up now and find them…. Once you’re connected, you can then set a static IP.

Print Quality

Another tthing i read in reviews was the quality of print this samsung delivers. I can say without hesitation, those reviews are wrong and those opinions are null and void. The quality of print is superb for a laser printer. Much, much sharper and smoother than my inkjet and the colours are also brighter and more fluid. I’ve compared the colour test page with a standard colour newspaper print. You can see the difference for yourself…

Of course that’s not a fair comparison, but it does give you an idea of what to expect… not photo quality, but more than acceptable for a laser. If you want quality colour prints, go get a good inkjet. If you don’t really care about printing photos, this samsung is perfectly fine when it comes to printing in colour.

Print Speed

16 pages per minute in black and white, 4 pages per minute in colour is the official line from Samsung. I’m not sure how they measure that (e.g. if you just have one word in colour, does that count as colour?) but whatever speed it is, it’s fast. In my own little experiment i printed out a 7 page college assignment on both my inkjet printer and this new samsung laser.

Most of it was black and white text however the headings were in colour. I timed them both from the moment i hit ‘print’ in microsoft word. Here’s the times;

• Epson Stylus CX3600: 4 mins 27 seconds
• Samsung CLP-315W: Laser: 1 min 30 seconds

This was just a completely random test. This is the sort of stuff i normally print out… i could have printed in just black and white to destroy the inkjet completely but i thought i better keep it fair and use colour. I later found out that black and white means black and white… no colour can be present at all and if i print in black and white only, the speed drastically increases. I get about 13/14 pages per minute.

In the end, the samsung’s raw power was all too much for the inkjet to handle… the laser was almost three times as quick as it’s inkjet cousin. And this is by no means a quick laser printer, in fact it’s pretty slow compared to most (especially when it comes to colour). However, it’s still 3 times as quick as the inkjet when printing in colour and it delivers better results.

Happiness

No product comes with happiness yet it’s the most sought after feature by consumers 🙂 Am i happy with this new Samsung laser printer? Yes. Here’s why…

• Size
• Looks
• Speed
• Wifi
• Print quality
• Cost (€166 delivered from amazon)

I’d done my homework on it so knew i was getting a decent printer but you never can reviews and sales pitches until you get to try things out for yourself. I’ve tried it out and the Samsung CLP-315W gets my seal of approval.