Samsung CLP-310 Toner Review

You don’t get breakneck laser speeds with the Samsung CLP-310 printer; however, this printer meets the requirements for providing budget-friendly color laser printing in a small form factor.

Samsung employs highly imaginative talented people with CADs, pencils, rulers, and the tensile strength of plastic and metal materials to create several electronic products that look very good, from TV sets to cell phones and more.

And then there is the CLP-310.

This is a color laser printer that looks like the previous mockups for anyone’s color laser printer might sound, only slightly smaller. This may seem like a fad complaint, but then Samsung is a company that produces a very attractive ML-1630 Laser Printer. Most likely, the design people have moved, and what we get is gray and ultimately dull.

This might seem like a strange feature to start with, but Samsung lists the small size of the CLP-310 as a selling point, and whom should we argue about?

At 388 x 313 x 243mm is undoubtedly on the smaller end for a color laser, despite the claim that it’s small enough to be placed “comfortably in the corner of a home, office, desk, or bookshelf” might be an optimistic touch. Except, of course, if you have a reasonably large bookshelf, presumably.

If there is a feature that most people look for in a laser printer, that’s speed. I would like to know later that Samsung only rated the CLP-310 at 16ppm rather slowly for black prints and 4pmm for color. This is far more honest compared to other vendors – especially Inkjet vendors, who often judge the amount of ppm around the printer level to spit out blank paper – but that is also not a voice of confidence in what is meant to be one of the primary selling points lasers.

CLP-310 is connected via USB 2. only – there is no network port attached, although the plastic tab on the back shows the potential of this framework to accommodate one – and is only a printer. People who are looking for multifunctional devices should look elsewhere.

The CLP-310 initial setup phase is very efficient and easy, right down to the direct installation on the toner cartridge. The CLP 310 toner cartridge is unfortunately rather small with the black cartridge (CLT-K4092S) only having 1,500 pages capacity and three worse color cartridges with 1,000 pages capacity. The small footprint is not the only little thing with this printer, but if you move from an inkjet printer, it’s not a problem.

Printing a test text document in draft quality takes about twenty-two seconds to write the initial page, but additional pages after that appear about every five seconds or so, giving a real speed rating of just over nine pages per minute. Print quality in draft mode is unexpectedly good, but at this speed, it must happen.

Provided with quite mono speed, we do not expect color pages to fly out of CLP-310. Samsung ranks the CLP-310 at four pages per minute in color; we can manage half of that with pretty heavy color coverage pages, and are similar to photo-style printing – but we won’t strictly recommend that consumers work with laser printers like this for specific photo jobs.

On the noise side, the CLP-310 works very well. This is far from being a truly quiet printer, but rather modest compared to the majority of competing lasers, and its large and sturdy body means it can absorb operating noise in a much smoother way compared to the creaking cases where most Inkjet machines placed.

The CLP-310 is a genuinely acceptable color laser for its price, and as long as you can wait a little while for the prints, they are also acceptable.