Samsung CLP-315W Review – Simple, Slow, Color Laser Printer

Pros

Samsung CLP-315W comes with smooth design, petite footprints, and individual toner cartridges and is a lightweight printer.

Cons

The print quality for Samsung CLP-315W is really poor and on top of it the printer lacks out-and-out cancel button, manual feeding tray, offers slow print speed and the running cost is higher than the average running cost.

Introduction

The Samsung CLP-315W is a complete color laser printer with integrated wireless connectivity, which makes it easier to connect the printer over a network. The compact CLP-315 is one of the smallest printers in its class and its individual toner cartridges allows you to replace every cartridge separately and hence saves money for you.

Though, the printer has got a decent design, but it lags significantly in terms of print speed and quality. According to our tests the Samsung CLP-315W somewhat twice as slow as the average color laser printer and the print quality for the printer is hardly acceptable for any media type. Samsung CLP-315W is priced at $250, which according to us is a lot of money, especially for a machine which hardly delivers a decent-call quality.

Design

The Samsung CLP-315W’s design is totally contradictory to the flashy designs of earlier Samsung printers like Samsung ML-1630. The Samsung CLP-315W has got a pretty simple and basic design with most of the chassis wrapped in a dark piano black with slight touches of lustrous plastic trim all-around the border. Measuring 15.3 x 12.3 x 9.6 inches (W x D x H) and weighing around 24.3 pounds the CLP-315W is astonishingly compact in comparison to other color laser printers. For instance, the Dell 1320c is nearly twice the size of Samsung CLP-315W but still doesn’t have a built-in wireless print server.

Just like the chassis the top of the printer is also pretty simple, and hosts a single power button and a lot of LED lights that indicates you of paper jams, toner shortage and wireless connection. One of the annoying things that we found on the control panel was the absence of dedicated cancel button, so that you can stop any command anytime you want, but now you’ll have to do it by hand through the operating system. There also us a foldout arm located at the top of the system for catching paper coming out of the feeder. Located at the bottom of the printer is a detachable paper tray with the capacity to hold standard 150 sheets of different sizes from 8.5 inches by 14 inches.

The CLP-315W uses four separate toner cartridges which are fitted right at the rear end of the printer. Being separate toner cartridges brings down the running cost a bit down, as you can easily change them singularly. The wireless connectivity for the printer comes from an in-built 802.11b/g, which is used for printing wirelessly from the computer. But like always, its better to install the driver using a USB 2.0 at first place and then set up an impromptu wireless connection. The biggest obstacle for some buyers can be its duty cycle number. The Samsung by fixing the duty cycle for the printer has also limited the number of pages that it can print and with Samsung CLP-315W you only can print 20,000 pages. So evaluate you printing requirements to its maximum limit and then only buy the Samsung CLP-315W. This will protect you from any sort of inconvenience.

System Configuration

Starting price: $189.89 – $261.60
Manufacturer: Samsung
Part Number: CLP-315W/XAA
Printer Type: Workgroup printer – Laser – Color
Operating System: MS Windows XP, MS Windows 2003, Linux, Apple MacOS X 10.3 – 10.5, MS Windows 2000, MS Windows Vista
Connectivity Technology: Wired and   Wireless

Dimensions (W x D x H): 15.3 x 12.3 x 9.6 inches
System weight: 24.3 lbs
Processor: Samsung 360 MHz
Supported Media Type: Labels, Cards, Transparencies, Envelopes
Monthly Duty Cycle: 20000 pages

Performance

In comparison to some other printers from the same price bracket and segment the Samsung CLP-315W is significantly slow color laser printer. The print speed for both black-and-white and color is extremely slow, especially the color print speed at times can be frustrating. The CLP-315W delivered the speed of 13.15 pages per minute in our plain black print test, which was just better than the speed of Dell 1320c. The color printing time taken by CLP-315W for any sort of color document is way more than the time taken by any other printer. It takes meager 3.64 PPM to print color graphics and about 4.07 PPM for printing color text.

Even the print quality hardly makes it up for its slow speed and the print output of the printer was inconsistent for both, the color printing as well as for black-and-white printing. The black and white text prints were just as you expect from any laser printer, and appeared well printed with sharp detailing even for the smallest readable font, but sadly the same can’t be said about the colored characters as they came out inappropriately layered. Though, there are settings embedded in the driver that lets you set the prints to darken or fine, but this too didn’t made any big impact on the overall print quality.  The only result that satisfied was the result for the graphic document.

Support

Samsung CLP-315W is backed by a one-year industry standard warranty which covers parts and labor, but only when there is a defect from in manufacturer. There also I telephonic support available everyday from 6 am to 6 pm PT. lastly, there is Samsung’s Web site containing useful information like driver and manual downloads, a complete list of FAQs and a media guide.Samsung CLP-315W

Word from the Experts

The Samsung CLP-315W with its straightforward design is a nice looking wireless laser printer. But the print quality from the printer is not at all acceptable and to make it even worse for the printer there is its intensely slow speeds, which will give enough time to you look for another printer.