Do you remember when laser printers first hit the scene? The print job was superior to the ink-jet printers, but the sheer mass and size of the thing, along with the air pollution it created and the expensive price tag made it a difficult machine to get close to. Since then, the laser printers started getting smaller, but then came along the color laser printer. Even though it was in color, it was still a big ogre-like laser printer. Today, these laser printers have even penetrated homes, and they are here to stay.

It weighs in at 13.6kgs (approximately 30 pounds), with a width of 39 cm, 34.4 cm in length and 26.5 cm in height, which is slightly bigger than the mono-laser printers in the market, but about half the size of its competing color-laser printers.

The pages may be inserted by releasing the holders in the middle of the tray and creating more space for the paper to be inserted, and the tray is fed with a purple, semi-lucent tray cover. The tray is released enough for the paper to be inserted comfortably. The operating part has an orange "Stop" button, LED status indicators in green, orange and red, along with four LEDs indicating the status of each of the color toners.

The reason why people have phobia of office machines such as printers and photo-copiers is because these products are not transparent. CLP-300 is not afraid to show some skin. Once you open the front cover, you see four cylinder color toners. These toners are easily removed by grabbing and pulling on the cartridge handle.

The CLP-300 breaks people's prejudice that "color" printers need to be slow. The CLP-300 supports three types of print mode of "fast," "normal" and "high quality." The only difference between the modes is in how much of the toner is used for the particular print job, so there is not much difference in how fast the printing takes depending on the modes.

A black and white print takes 14 seconds for the first page at 16 print per minute ("ppm"), with color printing taking 26 seconds at 4 ppm. The product is focused on making this a personal printer, and thus the print speed is faster for black and white prints. You may feel that a 4 ppm rate is slow compared to inkjet printers, but if your print jobs include pictures, the inkjets automatically slows down, and the laser printer will actually print faster.

A low noise technology NO-NOIS¢â (Non Orbiting Noiseless Optic Imaging System) was implemented in the printer resulting in a printer quieter than its competing products. The actual specifications indicate noise below 48dB when color printing, below 49dB when printing in black and white and 35dB when on standby.

An essential element of a good print job is high readability. The CLP-300 supports excellent readability through a resolution of 2400dpi. It prints clearly text in font size 5, which you will ordinarily have to read with a magnifying glass. Inkjets will not be able to mimic the CLP-300's ability to print at high resolution on any kind of paper.

It is a given that unless you use special machines, the quality of printing pictures will lag behind pictures printed from inkjet printers that specialize in printing pictures. It is difficult to recreate the color on the monitor, and because the particles are thick the picture even looks slightly rough. This is not a problem particular to the CLP-300 but common to all laser printers. You will experience a better picture if you use A4 paper used for printing pictures, and the picture won't blot on the paper. However, printings done at home and in small offices generally are partially color, and they will experience quality that is second to none. It performs especially well when printing the lines and charts of graphs in primary colors.

However, like other Samsung products, the program can be installed easily. Unless you require a particular setting, all you need to press is "Next" and "Finish."

There were times when toners used to cost as much as the inkjet printers. The trend still continues today. However, the color laser printers are a different story. The only additional cost to using inkjet printers is the toner, but this is different for color laser printers. You have other supplemental devices such as toners, printer and drum, and users have to put some thought into their selection of these items.

With these kinds of numbers, you certainly will not worry about durability at home. For every 5% use of the toner you can print 2,000 pages in black and white, and up to 1,000 pages in other colors.