Samsung CLP-510 Color Laser Printer Drivers and Software

Some printers in these labs cost around £200, but not all offer the same value for money. The Samsung CLP-510 turned out to be the best bargain, mainly due to the running costs, which nothing here can compete with.

It comes with enough toner for 3,000 mono pages or 2,000 color pages. However, once you purchase your first set of replacement pages, you should see 7,000 or 5,000 pages respectively. This means you’ll be replacing them much less often than most printers here.

Even if you take into account other expensive consumables such as the imaging drum and transfer belt, printing with the Samsung only costs 1.3p per mono page and 6.4p for color. Only the Epson and Konica Minolta can match these prices, but a look at our low-usage scenario shows that the Samsung CLP-510 is cheaper to run than its budget rivals. Ideal if you are looking for a color laser for your home office.

We were surprised to find a built-in duplex unit, but this is a standard feature on the CLP-500 series. Only the more expensive HP has a duplexer, but also Ethernet, which the CLP-510 lacks. The equivalent Samsung – the CLP-510n – costs £65 extra. A bonus, however, is the 100-sheet multi-purpose tray (the only one in the labs) located on the right side of the printer. There is a standard 250-sheet tray at the bottom of the front.

The CLP-510 is actually quite quiet when printing and the drivers are comprehensive. But the Samsung is not a perfect all-rounder. As a four-pass unit, the speed lags behind more expensive printers. It took 32 seconds to print a single color page from warm, and our color letter appeared at just 6 pages per minute. For mono, the CLP-510 managed almost 24 pages per minute, which is much more respectable. Duplex speeds were 6 ppm in mono and 3 ppm in color.

Related Printer: Samsung CLP-550 Driver

Quality also leaves something to be desired. Business charts and tables looked good from a distance, but characters were blurrier than other printers. Photos and images are less impressive – halftoning is easy to see, making everything appear grainy. Reds and blues were particularly achromatic. So if color accuracy and color quality are important, Samsung is not the best choice.