Samsung CLP-500 review

Jeffrey Fuchs CNET

Published: 09 Feb 2004

With an estimated street price of less than £500 (inc. VAT), the Samsung CLP-500 occupies the middle ground between a luxurious personal colour laser printer and a thrifty option for a home-based business or a small office. The CLP-500 includes space for a network interface card, slots for additional RAM, and room for another paper tray, too (but including all of these options shifts the price tag to over £1,000). Medium to large businesses looking for a fast workgroup laser without colour capability should look instead at the Dell W5300n, and home offices looking for colour without a workgroup option should check out the HP Colour LaserJet 1500L. For those who want both, the Samsung CLP-500 is a winner.

Design

Samsung's CLP-500 colour laser printer is low on flash; it looks like an electronic office appliance from a bygone era. Housed in grey plastic, the round-edged, boxy CLP-500 measures 51 by 47 by 40.5cm, which is about average for colour lasers. It has a solid feel to it, weighing an above-average 35kg when fully loaded with toners.

A 250-sheet-capacity output tray sits on top, and a 250-sheet paper-cassette input tray rests at the printer's base (an additional 500-sheet paper-input tray sells for £249 ex. VAT). The CLP-500's multi-purpose tray is located on the right side of the printer, and although made of flimsy lightweight plastic, you must use it when printing envelopes, labels, transparencies, pre-printed paper or card stock. Unfortunately, it holds only a slim stack of 10 envelopes, 10 typical sheets of labels or 100 sheets of paper. We've seen larger capacities elsewhere.

Immediately below the paper-output tray is the CLP-500's control panel, with a thin string of buttons on both sides of a two-line, 32-character LCD panel. The buttons provide access to the most basic level of operational control, and they are easy and intuitive to use: for example, one button cancels print jobs, and the rest are for manoeuvring through the printer's options menu, which ranges from fine-tuning the duplex-printing operations to turning off the low-consumables alarm.

Inside a panel on the left-hand side are the four toner containers -- one each for black, yellow, magenta, and cyan. And in the back left corner there are ports for power, USB 2.0 and parallel connections. Samsung intentionally leaves some space open on the back for a wireless network antenna or a network interface card. An Ethernet 10/100BaseTX and 802.11b wireless adapter sell for £159 (ex. VAT) and £199 (ex. VAT) respectively, and an already network-ready (but not wireless) version of the CLP-500, the CLP-500N, with an estimated street price of £599 (inc. VAT), will be available at the end of January 2004.

Features

The Samsung CLP-500 colour laser printer's most notable features are its built-in duplex unit and its expansion capabilities.

The duplex unit, used for double-sided printing, is housed on the right side of the CLP-500, just above the multipurpose tray. To enable automatic two-sided copying, you can either choose Layout, then Duplex from the printer's control-panel menu or select Duplex directly from the Properties tab within the computer's driver. The double-sided text that we produced was both clear and legible on both sides of the paper and didn't suffer from bleed-through.

The CLP-500 includes both USB 2.0 and parallel port connections, plus it comes with 64MB of RAM and provides extra slots that hold up to 192MB total. When the CLP-500 is fully extended with these extras, Samsung estimates that the network model CLP-500N should support an office workgroup of 20 to 24 people. That sounds overly optimistic to us, given the 266MHz processor and 10-envelopes-at-a-time maximum. But without a lot of colour printing or specialty media work, a fully expanded CLP-500N could reasonably support 10 to 15 people without slowing down.

It took us about 20 seconds to hook up the CLP-500 via USB cable (not included) and load the printer drivers onto a PC running Windows XP Professional. The CLP-500 also is compatible with Windows 95 and later, Macintosh systems 8.6 and later (with the sole exception of Mac OS X 10.0), and many versions of the Linux OS. The CLP-500 doesn't use PostScript emulation, which preserves font styles, but instead uses SPL-C (Sharp Printer Language with Compression) emulation designed to speed up large data jobs. If you need exact font matches, you might consider a different colour-laser system.

Performance

In our performance tests, the Samsung CLP-500 colour laser printer proved a very fast worker. Clocking in at 14.1 pages per minute (ppm) on monochrome text, the CLP-500 beat both the Minolta QMS 2300DL colour laser with its 10.3ppm and the HP Colour LaserJet 1500L with its 11.2ppm. With monochrome mixed text and graphics, the CLP-500 sizzled at 14.6ppm, again beating both the 2300DL, which lagged at 10.7ppm, and the 1500L's 10.4ppm. In colour, the CLP-500 was sprightly at 4.5ppm, close to but, once again, faster than the Minolta-QMS, which we timed at 4.0ppm, and much faster than the HP 1500L, which delivered a score of 3.4ppm.

Speed aside, the quality of the CLP-500's black text is good but not as dark or crisp as we've seen elsewhere. In fact, when we closely appraised the text, we could see a fine mist of toner overspray around each printed character. Also, the colour text looks fair only, with gaps, dots and mismatched colour overprinting in the text, visible to the naked eye.

The CLP-500's graphics, on the other hand, are very good in monochrome, reproducing line art, gradients, and even black-and-white photographs cleanly and sharply. The colour graphics look almost as appealing -- certainly fine for most everyday business needs -- but like most all other colour laser printers we've seen, the CLP-500 doesn't consistently create finely shaded gradients.

At 5 percent coverage, the black starter cartridge is rated for 2,000 sheets, and the colour ones are rated for 1,500 each. Replacement cartridges offer more capacity, with black rated at 7,000 sheets and each colour producing 5,000 sheets. The estimated street prices for replacement toner cartridges are £66 (ex. VAT) for black and £76.80 (ex. VAT) for each colour. This works out to 6 pence per colour page, which is a middle-of-the-road cost compared with other colour lasers we've seen.

Service & support

Samsung covers the CLP-500 with a limited one-year parts-and-labour warranty against defects in materials and workmanship. For the life of the warranty, however, Samsung provides free telephone technical support. Going beyond the support offered by its competitors, Samsung also provides on-site repairs to correct material and workmanship defects, or if on-site service is not available, Samsung will arrange for transportation to an authorised Samsung service centre.

But the CLP-500 doesn't ship with a helpful setup poster; instead, it includes only a 28-page setup guide, and the CD-ROM includes a user guide, although there could be more info in the troubleshooting section. Samsung's Web site offers some FAQs, as well as the latest drivers and manuals available for download, but it doesn't provide as much online information as, say, HP's does.

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