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Samsung launches new colour laser printer

Friday 23 March, 2007

Laser printers have come quite a long way since their invention by Xerox back in 1971. Back in the old days, a laser printer would probably not fit in the office of a small to medium-sized enterprise, let alone the desk of the average home user, but technological developments have let to reductions in both cost and size; 22 years ago the HP LaserJet sold for £2,268 and would have required serious amounts of strength to lift. However, things have very much changed over the last two decades.

In keeping with the further development of laser printing technologies, it seems fitting that Samsung has announced the launch of a new colour laser printer, which may be of interest to users of Lexmark laser printers and HP laser toner cartridges and is so small it could easily be suited for either home or office use.

Although inkjet printers are currently dominating the market for home and small business users, Samsung's new CLP-300 could become a competitor to similarly priced colour inkjet printers as it has been specifically designed as a low-cost and compact machine and measures only 390x344x265 millimetres, with a price of around £160.

Inkjet printers achieve results by propelling small droplets of ink onto the surface of the paper and, in general, offer both home and business users high-quality output at prices that are lower than their laser counterparts.

However, the growth of the low-cost laser printer market could start to challenge the dominance of the inkjet as there are a number of disadvantages to the use of inkjet technology. In addition to the high cost of ink - not only can ink comparatively cost more than a fine bottle of wine - and the low storage capacity of inkjet cartridges, print heads can become blocked with ink and in many cases specialist paper must be used to achieve high-quality results.

Nevertheless, featuring print speeds of up to 16 pages-per-minute (ppm) in black and four ppm in colour, the CLP-300 offers print resolutions up to 2,400x600 dots-per-inch and - as far as printers go - is quieter than a mouse.

Toners are installed into the printer via four slots, which have been colour-coded for easy installation and are even of differing shapes to ensure that the wrong toner cartridge isn't inserted into the wrong slot. And although toner cartridges don't always come cheap, the Samsung CLP-300 is able to offer black and white prints at 2.8p per sheet and colour alternatives at a slightly more expensive 10.4p.

However, although the printer offers home and business users a number of features and is potentially attractive because of its minimal desktop presence, print quality is not as good as it could be, according to the Trusted Reviews.

"Print quality is okay but not ideal. Black text is noticeably over-printed, with letters looking heavy and over-emboldened. Colour business graphics are bright and with little visible stipple, but some colours don't work particularly well with black text overprints and there are occasional unwanted artefacts," said the review.

In contrast to inkjet printers which typically squirt the image onto the page, a laser printer "fuses" the image or text onto the paper through a process that could be akin to sticking gold leaf onto a cheap piece of metal.

However, despite the disadvantages of Samsung's low-cost laser printer, the continued dominance of the inkjet may not be assured; a number of other manufacturers offer low-cost laser products, including the HP Laserjet 1020 and the HP Q6455A, a colour laser printer which is able to print at resolutions of 600x600 dots per inch in both colour and black-and-white and features an Ethernet port for enhanced connectivity.

Invariably, because of its shortcomings with colour printings, Samsung's small and compact offering into the colour laser market may only be suitable for the office market, with the review criticising its shortcomings for colour print work, which could be an issue for users of printers such as the Canon Pixma MP600 or the Canon iP4200.

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