Samsung CLX-2160N Color Laser Multifunction Printer Driver and Software

A notable new addition is the Samsung CLX-2160N, which is smaller and lighter than most standalone desktop color laser printers – even more notable when you consider that it has a built-in 1200 x 600 dpi scanner for standalone mono or color copying or scanning .

Another bonus is that Ethernet connectivity comes as standard kit in addition to a regular USB 2 connection, making the printer a bargain at its £295 price tag.

Under the hood, the CLX’s print engine is essentially the same as the Samsung CLP-300N printer. This is both good and bad news.

On the plus side, a set of cartridges costs a fairly thrifty £124, which is around a third the price of some rival models.

However, you don’t get anything for nothing, as the black toner cartridge only lasts 2,000 pages, and the cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges only last about 1,000 pages, based on the usual five percent coverage per color.

This means the cost of consumables is relatively high at around 1.8p per mono page and 8.9p for color, making the Samsung ideal for relatively low volume use.

The Sansung CLX ‘s print quality is a mixed bag. Despite a high print resolution of 2,400 dpi, text appeared less sharp in our tests compared to most similarly priced color lasers.

For graphics and photos, color reproduction is a bit pale and bland, although a nice side effect is that you get some extra definition in low light (darker areas) of photos.

Again, sharpness can be poor, but banding (light streaks on the page) is minimal. The Samsung performs better in this regard than the small Dell 1320c color laser we tested last month.

In our testing, the CLX proved fast for mono printing, with a first page print time of just 13 seconds, making it one of the fastest in its class. Due to the four-pass color printing technology, the first page time for full-color documents proved slow at about 28 seconds.

The highest quality photo output took about 45 seconds for an A4 print – the same amount of time required for a normal quality color photocopy. The color speeds for multi-page printing easily met Samsung’s 4 ppm claims.

Related Printer: Samsung SCX-5350 Driver

Samsung’s main attraction is more than just another printer. It is the ability to make standalone photocopies. To support this there is a refreshingly intuitive user interface with 11 control buttons and a two-line alphanumeric LCD display.

Back with PC-based operations, the printer driver is equally basic, while software additions include ReadIris Pro 10 for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) work, a generous inclusion considering Samsung’s price.