Samsung CLP-315W
Manufacturer: Samsung Part number: CLP-315W/XAA
- More product information:
- Editors' review
- User reviews
- Specifications
- Accessories
- Manufacturer info
- Bottom Line:
- The Samsung CLP-315W is a fancy looking wireless laser printer with a clean design and small footprint, but the output quality is unacceptable and the blisteringly slow speeds will have you searching for other options
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CNET editors' review
Samsung CLP-315W price range: $198.99 - $260.51
- Reviewed by: Justin Yu
- Edited by: Rich Brown
- Reviewed on: 09/18/2008
The good: Small footprint; lightweight; sleek design; individual toner cartridges.
The bad: Poor quality prints; slow output; lacks dedicated cancel button; no manual feed tray; higher cost per page than average; low duty cycle.
The bottom line: The Samsung CLP-315W is a fancy looking wireless laser printer with a clean design and small footprint, but the output quality is unacceptable and the blisteringly slow speeds will have you searching for other options
The Samsung CLP-315W is a full color laser printer with built-in wireless connectivity that makes it easy to link several computers to the printer over a network. The compact CLP-315 series is one of the smallest in its class and the individual toner cartridges save money by giving you the option of replacing each one separately. Although the printer is well-designed, it loses its momentum in print speed and quality. Our test results show that the CLP-315W is as almost twice as slow as the average color laser and output quality is nowhere near acceptable. Priced at $250, the CLP-315W is too much money to put into a machine that can't deliver decent-quality prints.
Design and features
Unlike flashier Samsung printers such as the Samsung ML-1630, this one's design is very straightforward. The majority of the chassis is a dark piano black with touches of glossy plastic trim around the perimeter. The printer sits in at 15.3 inches wide by 12.3 inches deep by 9.6 inches tall and only weighs 24.3 pounds, so it's surprisingly compact compared with other color lasers. For example, the Dell 1320c is double the size and weight of the Samsung and has no built-in wireless print server.
The top of the Samsung printer is just as simple as the chassis, with a single power button and several LED lights to indicate a wireless connection and notify you about paper jams and toner shortages. The control panel annoyingly lacks a dedicated cancel button, so if you want to stop a job in mid-queue, you have to do it manually through the operating system. The top of the unit also has a foldout arm to catch paper on its way out of the feeder. A removable paper tray lives on the bottom of the CLP-315W and can hold the standard 150 sheets of paper in a variety of sizes up to 8.5 inches by 14 inches. Unfortunately, there's no manual feed slot that you commonly see in single function laser printers, but you can use the main input tray for different kinds of irregular media including envelopes, card stock, and transparency papers.
The CLP-315W uses four toner cartridges (three colors and one black) hidden behind a drop-down panel on the front faceplate. The cartridges are lightweight and easy to remove and replace using the color-coded tabs. Each cartridge only comes in one capacity (1,000 pages) and can be purchased through a variety of channels for about $40. Since the black and color cartridges cost the same, we can estimate that each page will cost about 4 cents to print, slightly more expensive than the Dell 1320c. The Samsung is also limited by the number of pages it can print per month. The CLP-315W's duty cycle number is 20,000 pages. Small businesses and workgroups with a high volume of monthly prints might be better suited for other printers such as the Brother HL-4040CN that can handle 35,000 pages per month.
The printer also has built in 802.11b/g for printing wirelessly from your computer. As always, we suggest installing the driver with the printer attached to your computer with USB 2.0 at first, and then setting up an ad-hoc wireless connection. Establishing a wireless connection between the printer and our test bed gave us a bit of a headache, but once we realized how to print out the network configuration report, the rest became easy. The report shows the printer's IP address and other information you need to put in the SyncThru Web Service, a Web server embedded into the driver that lets you adjust your network settings without additional software. Once you obtain all the necessary reports, the connection wizard in SyncThru will handle the rest of the setup process. The whole procedure took approximately half an hour to establish a successful wireless connection.
Performance
Relative to other similarly priced color laser printers, the CLP-315W is significantly slower than the pack in both black and white and especially color prints. It scored 13.15 pages per minute for plain black speed, slightly faster than the Dell 1320c. The CLP-315W also takes the longest to spit out any kind of color document, scoring a measly 3.64 pages per minute for color graphics and 4.07 pages per minute for color text. The rest of the units in the comparison lineup finished printing in less than half the time in both categories.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color graphics speed | |
Presentation speed | |
Color text speed | |
Black text speed |
Unfortunately, the print quality hardly makes up for the slow print speeds. We experienced inconsistent results between black and white and color prints. As expected from any laser printer, black and white text appears well formed with sharp detail down to the smallest readable font size, but colored characters come out improperly layered, resulting in a thick, smeared composition. Settings embedded into the driver let you set the prints to "darken" or "fine," but we didn't notice any difference in quality throughout our presentation, text, and graphics tests. In the end, the graphic document is the only test we found to be remotely passable. Colors in the composite pictures appear true to form with clean edges and line separation. However, we noticed that the Samsung had difficult time transitioning between colors.
Service and support
Samsung backs the CLP-315W with an industry standard one-year warranty that covers parts and labor in the event of a manufacturer's defect. Telephone support is available everyday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. Finally, Samsung's Web site contains useful information such as manual and driver downloads, a media guide, and a comprehensive list of FAQs.
Find out more about how we test printers.
User reviews
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Very good color laser printer for under $200
by nrm590 on September 18, 2008
Pros: Small and compact, very small foot print, pretty quiet operation for a laser printer, and it looks good. Cheap to replace toner compared to other laser printers and almost all inkjets.
Cons: Slow with color prints.
Summary: This printer is great for people who are looking for a decent color laser printer for less then $200. I got mine for $150 at Sam's Club, I am ...
Summary: This printer is great for people who are looking for a decent color laser printer for less then $200. I got mine for $150 at Sam's Club, I am using it in my dorm room and it is great, I print out a lot of power points from my teachers website for class and it very useful. I use to have a inkjet printer but every few months I would have to replace the cartridges, and that got expensive.
So when I was looking for a new printer for college I saw this and I considered it as a maybe. My big concern was the price of toner and I found it ranged from $35-$42 and that was about the same price for high-yield ink for the inkjet at my house. But the toner lasted for a 1000 pages while ink lasted maybe at the most 350 pages.
I have used it to print text, power points, and a few photos. I like the quality of the prints. Text looks great on this printer as do text mixed with graphics, as for photos, granted for $150 they are not the best but they were better then I thought they be and they look better then most ink jet printers, the colors seemed real and accurate.
Bottom line, if you are looking for a decent color laser printer, that you will not use to print insane amounts, this is great. I print only about 50 pages a week of 99% being black and white and on an inkjet I would end up buying new cartridges every couple of months. with this I am good for the semester.
I almost forgot on top of the saving for toner it also looks great, and I like that it is so small I can put this in lots of places because it's size. It is not a giant like most laser printers.3 out of 3 users found this user opinion helpful.
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Good small business color laser printer
by RonHills on September 9, 2008
Pros: Good color quality (not inkjet quality for photos) for short run mailers, presentations, etc. Inexpensive, small footprint, fairly fast warm-up, quiet. Relatively low cost per page.
Cons: No single sheet feed for envelopes, transparencies, etc! After hours of trying we still can't get it to connect to our wireless network, but it works fine wuth USB. Typical laser printer odor.
Summary: Hopefully Samsung will release a patch or update to facilitate wireless network connection.
Summary: Hopefully Samsung will release a patch or update to facilitate wireless network connection.
2 out of 2 users found this user opinion helpful.
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decent for the price
by david0704 on September 23, 2009
Pros: Wireless access is convenient
Cons: Get false readings about doors being ajar making printing difficult. The cartriges are expensive and don't last long
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network configuration is impossible
by alexofindy on August 23, 2009
Pros: inexpensive. too early to judge quality
Cons: network configuration is nearly impossible! the only way to configure the network interface is via the network interface. There's isn't even a means of restoring the factory default without using the network interface.
Very much a catch 22!Summary: OK as USB printer. Only recommend for network use by confirmed geeks in simple home networks without authentication
And since you probably won't be able to use the network ...Summary: OK as USB printer. Only recommend for network use by confirmed geeks in simple home networks without authentication
And since you probably won't be able to use the network configuration, why not buy the less expensive model without it? -
Great Printer - Can't Beat the Price
by marcyu on June 10, 2009
Pros: It's a color laser printer, which means it beats the heck out of quality and price compared to an inkjet.
Cons: No on-printer LED/LCD screen. One button serves as a blind reset/continue/cancel interface.
Summary: *Price is right (~$150), especially for the feature set included
*Toner price/cost per page is not outrageous (~$30 each)
*Wireless makes it extremely convenient to share in a house ...Summary: *Price is right (~$150), especially for the feature set included
*Toner price/cost per page is not outrageous (~$30 each)
*Wireless makes it extremely convenient to share in a house with a router
*Also includes a wired Ethernet port
*Quality is extremely good for the price range -
This printer is inexpensive and that shows.
by cnetreviewer1234 on January 25, 2009
Pros: Looks nice, is easy to set up, has wi-fi connection
Cons: the quality of prints is BAD! When a document is printed, the type is blurry and not fine. When pictures are printed, they are not to the quality of other laser printers. Not to mention that this printer is S......L..........O........W! DO NOT BUY
Summary: This product looks good and has a wi-fi connection. it is also inexpensive, but at the same time CHEAP! The printing quality is not what is should be and the ...
Summary: This product looks good and has a wi-fi connection. it is also inexpensive, but at the same time CHEAP! The printing quality is not what is should be and the printer is ridiculously SLOW! Spend a little more money and get a printer that actually works decently!
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Do not buy this printer
by xdan1 on January 18, 2009
Pros: Stylish looks, small footprint, easy setup and price.
Cons: Reliability: after printing about 50 fully colored pages the printer breaks down.
Noticeable banding appears and then colors became mixed up, green became purple and eventually everything completely reddish/purple after that it is unusable.Summary: We returned the printer for exchange 3 times and with each printer we had the same result. There is no "resetting the machine" after it broke down. It seems like ...
Summary: We returned the printer for exchange 3 times and with each printer we had the same result. There is no "resetting the machine" after it broke down. It seems like it overheats after 50-60 pages and something gets damaged. It will still print in B&W but not in color. We called Samsung and after our describing the problem we were told to return the printer and that was a definite problem... I never had an experience like that with any computing equipment before. If Samsung fixes the problem, then it will be a reasonable printer, it is slow for a laser printer but quality is OK and the price is low. If you already have one and need to print a 100 pages document with lots of color my advice would be to print no more than 30 pages at a time and wait 2 hours before printing the next batch. When the printer starts printing wrong, it is over, you will not be able to repair it.
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Broke twice no replacement for 3 months now!!!
by thirdyem on January 14, 2009
Pros: Prints are so so & kind of fast.
Cons: The 1st printer broke.It took Samsung a 1 1/2 to replace it.and then that one broke. Now I have 2 none working printers and requested a label to mail back the 1st defective printer and still haven't gotten it 3 months later.Tech Supp used profanity!!
Summary: This product is horrible and I don't recommend it to anyone. The printer is cheaply built, has a funny smell, and gets paper jams that are unrepairable.
Summary: This product is horrible and I don't recommend it to anyone. The printer is cheaply built, has a funny smell, and gets paper jams that are unrepairable.
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Don't waste your money!
by skaderly on January 3, 2009
Pros: Small footprint.
Cons: Awful color print quality, slow.
Summary: Apparently I didn't read the editor's review closely enough because it clearly states that the print quality is unacceptable. It would have been nice if the editor had ...
Summary: Apparently I didn't read the editor's review closely enough because it clearly states that the print quality is unacceptable. It would have been nice if the editor had put that statement in bold. I was lured in by the small footprint and some decent user reviews before deciding to purchase this unit over the comparable Brother unit.
I previously owned a Konica Minolta color laser, purchased at Sam's Club, which had awesome print quality but it went berserk after the original color print cartridges needed replacement.
I regret purchasing this unit and I'll probably have to dump it on ebaY and take a big loss. I am also shocked that Samsung, which normally puts out good stuff, would even sell a product that outputs such garbage.
If color print quality means anything to you, then this is not the printer for you to buy. Don't make the same mistake that I did. -
ooh ohh that smell !!
by natbr on September 25, 2008
Pros: Compact size, great network options (wireless, ethernet, USB 2.0), overall stylish looks, great b/w and color output. Overall I liked the overall look and operation of this printer -- it was slow but not too slow, quiet .. and worked out of the box.
Cons: The smell ... this printer emits a *strong* burnt crayon smell after printing 2-3 color pages. In a small home office like mine -- its unacceptable,. Also, it has LCDs instead of LCD screen. The paper tray is about as flimsy as I've seen.
Summary: I really wanted to keep this printer .. nice small size, quiet, sytlish and good quality output. I won't go into toner cost because its going back on smell alone ...
Summary: I really wanted to keep this printer .. nice small size, quiet, sytlish and good quality output. I won't go into toner cost because its going back on smell alone -- its bad. The flashing lights are a minor issue as is the flimsy paper tray -- although when you pull it out it tends to expand to legal size - ARRGGG. Also the dimensions of the printer say its 12.3" deep -- sure if you are printing on 5X8 stock. If you happen to want to print on 8 1/2X 11" (like who doesn't?), the paper tray juts out another 2.5 inches. Use 14.5 as your dimension -- not 12.3.
I know all lasers "smell bad" -- but this one is really strong, like headache central. Its RMA back to NewEgg -- who by the way did me right.Will buy from them again.
Specifications
- Manufacturer: Samsung
- Part number: CLP-315W/XAA
- Description: Imagine vibrant, professional color within reach. The network ready wireless CLP-315W can fit comfortably on a corner of your home office desk or bookcase. The stylish printer features a rich, piano-black control panel, and delivers dynamite color at 4ppm and sharp laser text at 17ppm. You'll also get NO NOIS print engine technology for quiet operation, along with easy-to-change toner cartridges. It features big color and small footprint. With the Samsung CLP-315W color laser printer, it's not hard to imagine.
General
- Printer Type Workgroup printer - Laser - Color
- Width 15.3 in
- Depth 12.3 in
- Height 9.6 in
- Weight 24.3 lbs
Printer
- Print Speed up to 16 pages/min - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 17 pages/min - Letter A Size (8.5 in x 11 in), up to 4 pages/min - A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), up to 4 pages/min - Letter A Size (8.5 in x 11 in)
- Connectivity Technology Wired, Wireless
- Interface USB, 802.11b, 802.11g, Ethernet 10/100Base-TX
- Max Resolution ( Color ) 2400 dpi x 600 dpi
- First Print Out Time B/W 19 sec
- First Print Out Time Color 26 sec
- Language Simulation SPL-C
- Media Handling 150-sheet multipurpose tray
Processor
- Processor Samsung 360 MHz
RAM
- RAM Installed ( Max ) 32 MB / 64 MB (max)
Media Handling
- Media Type Cards, Labels, Envelopes, Transparencies
- Min Media Size (Custom) 3 in x 6.3 in
- Max Media Size (Custom) 8.5 in x 14 in
- Media Sizes A4 (8.25 in x 11.7 in), Legal (8.5 in x 14 in), Letter A Size (8.5 in x 11 in)
- Media Weight 60 g/m2 - 163 g/m2
- Total Media Capacity 150 sheets
- Media Feeder(s) 1 x Autoload - 150 sheets
- Output Trays Capacity 100 sheets
Duty Cycle
- Monthly Duty Cycle 20000 pages
Telecom
- Modem None
Networking
- Networking Print server
- Connectivity Technology Wired, Wireless
- Data Link Protocol Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g, Fast Ethernet
Scanner
- Type None
Copier
- Copier Type None
Expansion / Connectivity
- Connections 1 x Hi-Speed USB - 4 pin USB Type B
Miscellaneous
- Consumables Included 1 x Toner cartridge ( Black ) - up to 1500 pages
- Microsoft Certifications Works with Windows Vista
Power
- Power Device Power supply - Internal
- Power Consumption Operational 350 Watt
- Power Consumption Stand by / Sleep 10 Watt
Battery
- Type None
Software / System Requirements
- OS Required Linux, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows 2003, Microsoft Windows Vista, Apple MacOS X 10.3 - 10.5
Environmental Parameters
- Min Operating Temperature 50 °F
- Max Operating Temperature 89.6 °F
- Humidity Range Operating 20 - 80%
- Sound Emission (Operating) 45 dBA
Accessories
Manufacturer info
- Samsung
- Manufacturer profile
- Browse Samsung products on Shopper.com
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- Website: http://www.samsungusa.com/
- Address:
105 Challenger Road, Ridgefield Park, NJ 07660 - Phone: 1-800-726-7864
- Fax: 1-973-601-6001
