Samsung CLP-310 Color Laser Printer Driver and Software

The Samsung CLP-310 is a color laser printer that looks exactly like you’d imagine the early mockups for any color laser printer, just a little smaller. This may seem like idle whining, but after all, Samsung is the company that gave us the very attractive ML-1630 laser printer. Presumably these design people have evolved and what we get is gray and ultimately very boring.

Characteristics

It may seem like an odd feature at first, but Samsung lists the Samsung CLP-310’s small size as a selling point, and who are we to argue?

At 388 x 313 x 243mm it’s certainly on the small side for a color laser, although claiming that it’s small enough to “fit comfortably in the corner of your desk or bookshelf at home” is perhaps a little optimistic. Unless you probably have pretty large bookshelves.

If there’s one feature that most people associate with laser printers, it’s speed. It’s strange, then, that Samsung only rates the CLP-310 at a relatively modest 16 ppm for black and white prints and 4 ppm for color. It may be a lot more honest than many vendors – particularly inkjet suppliers, who seem to value the ppm count against the rate at which the printer can spit out blank paper – but it’s also not a vote of confidence for a laser, which is a major selling point.

The Samsung CLP-310 connects via USB 2.0 only – there’s no network port built in, although a plastic tab on the back indicates that this particular case may be able to accommodate one – and is just a printer. If you’re looking for a multifunctional device, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Someone needs to sell Samsung a vowel quickly. To appeal to consumers, Samsung is promoting the Samsung CLP-310’s low operating noise under the frankly nauseating marketing term of NO NOIS press technology. Unless of course the printer doesn’t have a nose and it’s a simple typo. All we could see was a rather pretzel-like “ColorXpression” logo on the front.

Performance

The initial setup phase of the CLP-310 was suitably efficient and simple, right down to the easy installation of the toner cartridges. When the Samsung CLP-310 first came to life, we were a little worried about the whole NO NOIS business, as it was quite loud, at least at first. However, after we fought our way through the installation, things became correspondingly quieter.

A sample text document printed at draft quality took about 22 seconds to spit out the first page, but additional pages came out about every five seconds after that, giving it a real-world speed of just over nine pages per minute. The print quality in the draft was surprisingly good, but at these speeds it would be desirable.

Given its modest monochrome speeds, we didn’t expect the color pages to fly out of the Samsung CLP-310. Samsung rates the CLP-310 at four pages per minute in color; We’ve managed half of that with a page with fairly strong color coverage, and similarly with photo-style printing – although we wouldn’t necessarily recommend consumers use a laser printer like this for specific photo work.

On the noise front, the Samsung CLP-310 performed moderately well. It’s still a long way from being a truly quiet printer, but it’s also slightly quieter than most competing lasers, and its bulky, solid body means it absorbs its operating noise much more robustly than the creaky cases most are built into Inkjet printers are built into it.

Related Printer: Samsung CLP-315

Any praise for owning the “smallest color laser printer in the world”? Probably not in the long term; We suspect that consumers are too savvy to buy based solely on a style feature, especially when very little effort has otherwise been put into the design. The CLP-310 is a perfectly acceptable color laser for the price, and as long as you can wait for the print output, they are perfectly acceptable.