You aren't getting extremely quick laser speeds with the Samsung CLP-310 printer, however, it does meet the buildup in providing budget friendly colour laser printing in a small form factor.
Samsung employs talented individuals who are very imaginative with CAD, pencils, rulers and the tensile strengths of plastic and metal materials to create a handful of very great looking electronic products, from tv sets to mobile phones and a whole lot more.
And then there's the CLP-310.
It is a colour laser printer that looks just like the previous mockups for anyone's colour laser printer may perhaps look like, just a bit smaller. This may appear like idle complaining, but then Samsung is the company that produced the extremely appealing ML-1630 Laser Printer. Most probably those design folks have moved on, and what we get is grey and ultimately dull.
This may appear like an odd feature to start with, yet Samsung lists the small size of the CLP-310 as a selling point, and who are we to quibble?
At 388 x 313 x 243mm it is undoubtedly on the smaller end for a colour laser, although the claim that it's small enough to be placed "comfortably on a corner of your home, office, desk or bookcase" is probably a touch optimistic. Unless of course if you have quite large bookshelves, presumably.
If there is a feature that most people look for on a laser printer, it's speed. I'm curious then, that Samsung only rates the CLP-310 at a somewhat slow 16ppm for the black prints and 4pmm for colour. It's really quite a lot more honest compared to the other vendors - particularly Inkjet vendors, which often rate the ppm count at around the rate the printer could spit out blank paper - however it is also not a vote of confidence in what exactly is intended to be among laser's major selling points.
The CLP-310 is connected through a USB 2. only - there is no network port built in, although a tab of plastic on the back points to the potential for this particular framework to accommodate one - and is a printer only. Those people who are after a multifunction device must look elsewhere.
The initial setup phase of the CLP-310 was well efficient and easy, all the way down to the straightforward installation of the toner cartridges. The CLP 310 toner cartridges are unfortunately somewhat small with the black cartridge (CLT-K4092S) only having a capacity of 1,500 pages and the three colour cartridges fairing even worse with a 1,000 page capacity. The small footprint isn't just the only small thing with this printer, however if you're moving up from an inkjet printer it isn't really an issue.
A test text document printing in draft quality took about twenty two seconds to print its initial page, however additional pages thereafter came out around every five seconds or so, giving it a real speed rating of just above 9 pages per minute. The print quality in draft mode was unexpectedly good, however at these speeds, it would have to be.
Provided with the calm mono speeds, we weren't expecting for the colour pages to fly out of the CLP-310. Samsung rates the CLP-310 at 4 pages per minute in colour; we were able to manage half of that with a fairly heavy colour coverage page, and similar with photo-style printing - however we would not strictly recommend that consumers work with a laser printer such as this for dedicated photo work.
On the noise front, the CLP-310 managed it really well. It is still a long shot from being a really silent printer, but it is somewhat silent compared to the majority of competing lasers, and its large sturdy body means it could absorb its operating noise in a much more refined fashion compared to the creaky cases that the majority of Inkjet engines get placed into.
The CLP-310 is a completely acceptable colour laser for its price, and so long as you can wait a little time for prints to come out, they're perfectly acceptable too.
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