Samsung CLP-770 Color Laser Printer Driver and Software

Color laser printers start at around £150 but quickly drop in price as you move from the SOHO to the workgroup market. You’re paying for extra speed, paper handling flexibility, and robustness to handle heavier workloads. If you reach between 500 and 600 euros, Samsung CLP-770 is on the menu.

This is a monolithic machine with a large, square-cut body that’s sloped at the front to make room for a control panel, and a somewhat odd arrangement of 500-sheet main paper tray and fold-down 100-sheet multi-purpose tray. When you fold down the multi-purpose tray, it opens a slot on the front of the device through which paper can be fed.

Optionally, you can add a few additional 500-sheet paper trays, bringing the total input capacity to 1,600 sheets, which should keep even a busy office running for a while. The paper is fed to a recess in the device’s top cover, but despite its significant dimensions, you still have to lift a support flap to prevent pages from falling off the back.

The control panel is simple but effective. The 4-line, 16-digit, backlit LCD display shows all status messages. The display is entirely bitmap, allowing both graphics and text to be displayed. Two buttons next to the display select menu options and save the menu tree. There’s also a four-way ring of navigation buttons with a large OK button in the middle. On the right there are Cancel and Power buttons.

Samsung rates the Samsung CLP-770 at 32 pages per minute for both black and color printing, but in our testing it didn’t come close to that speed. Short documents like our five-page black text print reached 12.5 pages per minute, while black text and color graphics – five copies of the same page – were slightly faster at 15 pages per minute. The color document was mostly faster because only a single page needs to be rasterized.

Increasing the page count to 20 on a black text test also increased the print speed to 23.5 pages per minute, which is still well below the advertised speed. Duplex printing, a standard option, was comparatively quick, with the same 20-page document printing on 10 sheets in 1:31, a speed of 13.19 pages per minute.

Related Printer: Samsung CLP-660ND Driver

Verdict

This is a good single-color laser printer for use in busy environments like large workgroups or small departments, but there’s not much to get excited about. It’s not overly fast or filled with the latest innovations. For example, there’s no front USB port or password-protected walk-in printing feature.