Customer Reviews

Samsung CLP-500 Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The size and weight of this big-cube-shaped printer are reminiscent of the first generation of black and white laser printers. Print quality is good. Colour pictures won't pass as photographs, but quality is acceptable, and, because the printer is a laser, you can get good results with cheap paper.

I am not normally a big fan of Samsung products, which, in my experience, seem to favor style over support and quality control. In this case, however, the design of the printer is simple and elegant, which - I hope - will translate into improved reliability. The four colour cartridges are arranged horizontally, rather than in a circular carousel. It's hard to pass up a duplexing color printer for less than the cost of some non-duplexing, black and white models. Doors on all sides give good access to the interior of the printer, although opening the door to the toner compartment is a little like opening a Japanese puzzle box. You open the door to get it halfway open, then pull out the top cartridge, which allows you to open the door all the way.

The printer is quiet - for a color laser printer. When it's in "sleep mode", it's silent. When it's printing, it whirs and clunks and sounds like most other laser printers. After printing, its fan runs for some minutes. The other laser printers I've owned made the lights flicker when they printed. So does this one. It takes a couple of minutes for the printer to wake up and print the first page. After that, it prints at close to the advertised speeds.

One of the most valuable features of this printer, and the one that sold me on it, is the duplexing (double-sided printing). It slows down the printing a little, but it saves paper, and also toner, if you print using booklet mode (see below). The duplexing works in an unusual way - each page is pushed out of the printer, but just before it completely emerges, the printer pulls it back in again and flips it around internally. If, like me, you have the bad habit of pulling sheets out of the printer as they are emerging, you may find yourself getting into a tug of war with a piece of paper the printer wants back.

Duplexing is well supported by the Windows based printer driver. "Booklet mode" is ideal for printing out long user manuals. It will print pages out in half-size, arranged two to a side, and double sided. It automatically puts the pages in the right order to make a booklet. So, if you are printing 64 pages, the first page to emerge will have pages 1 and 64 on one side, and 2 and 63 on the other. Once all the pages have emerged, just staple the center (you'll need a long-arm stapler) and fold it in half and you have a very nice looking booklet. In this mode, a 64 page document can be printed using 16 sheets of paper, and 32 pages of toner.

Consumables for the Samsung seem to be slightly higher in price than those for other laser printers, but obviously far cheaper than inkjets. Like most color lasers, it comes with "fun sized" cartridges, each good for 1500 pages or so. If you print a lot of full colour pages, you can use these up pretty quickly. Replacement cartridges are supposed to be good for 5000 pages. (7000 for black.)

There's a waste toner cartridge in the front of the printer which is supposed to be replaced every few thousand pages, although if you empty the toner dust out carefully into a plastic baggie you can easily reuse it.

Unlike most color lasers in this price range, this one comes with expandable memory, and a good sized standard paper tray (350 sheets). The auxiliary tray seems to handle light card stock quite well - nice if you want covers for your booklets. Again, this is well supported by the driver, which allows you to specify a different paper source for the first page, allowing you to print booklet covers on card stock automatically.

After getting ripped off at Kinko's, I needed a low priced color laser to print out brochures, menus and other business related jobs. Duplexing was also very important. Many other units require the additional purchase of an expensive duplexing kit - this one does not.

Speed wasn't a huge issue for me, since I typically run big jobs and walk away. The graphics and print quality are just fine by me. I am not looking for extra crisp magazine quality photos. My customers often wonder who prints my menus, and I just point over to the big beast. For light printing jobs and day to day graphics, I am very pleased with the quality. Yes you can get better quality, but not for this price.

Pros

- Great Value for the money

- Built in duplexing, slows printing down but it's free

- Quality acceptable for day to day printing

- Easily add wireless or network capability via expansion ports

The cons

- Included toner doesn't last very long. Each toner is about $120 - so it's advised you factor in toner very soon after purchase

- Large, heavy and bulky. You need an SUV or wagon to bring it home

- Sometimes jams with thinner paper. Easy to clear up and doesn't happen enough to be worrysome.

- You cannot use any type of glossy paper

All in all - I was looking for a color laser that provided the best bang for the buck and this one fit the bill.

It is huge it is heavy and you could turn the cardboard box into a new family room if you wanted. It is also quiet, faitly quick and the output looks very good. When printing post-script or word files the output is very crisp and clear, sharp enough to merrit the 1200dpi label, even serif fonts at tiny point sizes are clear. When printing images (black and white and color) of web pages and photos, the output is somewhat fuzzy, with clearly visible halftoning. Still, for spot color or printing color graphs and presentations the quality is quite good. For Mac users, you need to know that the Driver for os X is very basic, it does not support the built in duplexer, or some other features that the pc driver supports. Also as has been reported on some Mac (mac-in touch) news sites, future support for the Mac may be eliminated. Bad decision as far as I am concerned.

The Samsung CLP-500 is so inexpensive and packed with features that it didn't make sense for me to purchase anything else. And I couldn't be happier.

First off, ignore the other reviews that claim "fuzzy text." My 500 prints crisp text, even on cheap paper. These guys are either misinformed, or shills for HP, who is bleeding customers to Samsung right now.

The main selling point is built-in duplexing. I can print double-sided in full color. If I purchase 93 brightness 32 lb paper, I get a vivid print that's absolutely astonishing.

The consumable prices seem high, until you price them out per sheet. Think about it: You'll pay $100 for black toner (if you shop online) that gets you 7,000 pages. That 1.4 cents per page! Most other lasers price their consumables out to 2 to 3 cents per page. And forget inkjet. You'll pay 25 cents or more per page. When it comes to color, you'll pay about 8 cents per page on the Samsung, compared to 10 to 15 cents on an HP or any other printer. Inkjet photo printing can cost you up to $1 per print!

The Samsung is a real workhorse. It's definitely designed for office or professional home office use. I'd recommend it for beginner graphic designers and freelancers who need to put a little extra oomph into their printed materials.

And, for booklet printing, forget buying a longneck stapler. An internet search for "mini booklet stapler" will get you a great little stapler that does the job for under $10. Problem solved!

This printer has worked well for me for the past year. However it started developing a print issue wehre it would screw up some of the image information. I initially thought that it was due to me running a faster computer and the USB information was being sent too fast to the printer. Ie under-run issues on the printer itself due to lack of memory or processing horsepower. I bought an additional memory and it still does the same thing. Basically the printer has died for some reason and I'm not too happy about this. I expect to be able to print for a long time and just have to buy consumables (ie toner etc).

I'm going to ditch this printer and get some more reliable brand. HP or something similar. I don't want to have to deal with unreliable stuff as I need to print professional quality documents. Won't be buying a Samsung, that's for sure!

I could not recommend this printer to anyone! Why? Read on...

Firstly I should state I specifically bought this printer to print at least 4 copies of my PhD thesis (315 pages each copy).

I printed about 50 pages in a futile attempt to correct the slight bluriness inherent with all text. The bluriness is especially noticeable with serif fonts, on numbers such as 9 or anywhere there is a sharp point on a character. I tried all sorts of settings, different types of paper, downloaded the latest printer drivers --- still the same result. In comparison, my Canon LBP-810 prints crisper text and it is muuuch older (and cheaper).

The other problem with printing a large colour document with this printer is that if you select "colour printing", it does 4 passes on the black pages as well. So the thing is not smart enough to know that there isn't a speck of colour on B&W pages! This slows printing down to 5ppm. Since that speed is unacceptable, you have to print the whole document in B&W, then print the colour pages separately. This wastes paper, toner, & shortens the life of the transfer belt + rollers. If your document contains colour on every 2nd page, this also wastes vast amounts of time by deteminging the print ranges & inserting them once everything is printed.

Double-sided (duplex) printing slows printing speed considerably - less than half the speed. It would be quicker to do manual duplexing. So it's a white elephant in that department.

Apart from that, the printer is a juggernaut. It needs FURTHER space around it in order for the numerous compartments to open... and you will need to open these compartments frequently if you don't heed my advice. Despite the size, the paper tray can only accomodate 250 pages. There is a side feeder which takes another 100 pages, but that tends to get used for special papers. So if you seek a decent paper capacity you have to pay extra for the optional paper tray.

The printer stats tell me it has printed a total of 1369 mono pages & 191 in colour. Shortly before I reached that number, the squinty little display started complaining about a lack of black toner! Literally *ALL* of those black pages were 1.5 spaced, with huge margins. I.e. they shouldn't have used that much toner. THAT JUST ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH!!! If Samsung can't even afford to completely fill up the toner cartridges with toner, it makes you wonder about the quality of the rest of the unit.

I was satisfied with the colour output, although it couldn't handle a 3D excel graph that had white-grey planes graduated diagonally. It kept printing steps, instead of a steady colour change. Still, although the colour output is satisfactory, what good is a colour laser printer that cannot print crisp text adequately? Another white elephant. You might as well get a top of the shelf inkjet for this price.

One more thing:

The printer jams up at the slightest overfilling of the internal paper tray. In the end, 3 copies of a 315 page thesis printed out without incident, so I won't give it one star (but I am tempted).

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Customer Service Issues:

After dealing with Samsung Australia customer service I realised that they weren't willing to take back the printer for a refund. They were happy enough to arrange a technician to visit to check the printer was working correctly, but after being on hold several times, I basically informed them that I didn't think anything was wrong with my specific printer, but that the problem was probably endemic to all CLP-500s. THey said I'd have to take it back to the retailer.... yet the retailer insisted that I needed "special permission" from Samsung to accept it's return. I didn't pursue that circular path, saving time by knowing where it would take me - back where I started. I even told the customer service consultant rather bluntly that I couldn't be bothered asking for the manager or writing letters of complaint as that can get too stressful.

I purchased this printer last year with tax refund money. I thought that I was getting a great color printer for a pretty good price. I have a lot of IT experience, having repaired and run service on networks for over 20 years now. I've had experience with a LOT of printers in my time. This one was supposed to be for my home, just to print color pages. Well, I bought it in February, and by April, the thing almost caught fire in my bedroom. I started smelling smoke and turned it off. After hours on the phone with Samsung technical support, I discovered a gear had just broken off in the drive path. This was causing the whole machine to think that paper was still in the path and it had to eject it. Thus the smoke, it was literally burning up. Well, Samsung wanted ME to repair it myself, and insisted they send the parts. When the parts came, I found the area to repair was not accessible to the user, requiring special tools to open it up. So back to Samsung technical.

After reading my warrantee to them, I finally convinced them that the printer had on site warrantee. Then they told me they didn't have any service people in Kansas City. KANSAS CITY!!! Central US, Major hub of almost all commerace coming and going across the US. Home of of Sprint, and Hallmark and HUGE Ford, AND US Government HQ of IRS! NO support techs!

Well, they did send me another printer as a replacement, but no toner or drum, and told me to use the ones I had. They sent me the wrong printer. They sent me the CLP510N. The tone and drum and such to not match. So then they sent me another printer. This one worked with my toners, but by this time, it was September 2005. I had bought the printer in February, used it two months, and been without it 5 months. So now the printer works.

Come to February 2006. Warrantee is off, and the blue toner cart has developed a problem with streaking. Now the page count is only 560 pages on the color carts. So it's off to the store to buy a toner catridge. I find all CLP510 carts and no CLP500 carts. Not only that but the cost online of CLP500 carts is around $120 each, when the printer new is now running less than $300 for the CLP510.

Then I see my old friend, HP printers. I have had experience with dozens and dozens of HP printers, and never had a problem, and IF and WHEN one of them goes out, HP stands behind what they sell. I'm ditching the Samsung and will never be tempted again to purchase a Samsung computer component. NEVER. Neither will any of my IT customers. If they do, I won't support them anymore, and I have very loyal customers.

Do yourself a favor, stay away from the Samsung printers totally.

i urgently needed a laser colour printer and found this one rather cheap. although i wasnt satisfied with its performance, like fuzzy text etc. i still kept on using it. but then the problems seemed to attract my attention.

the major drawback which i found out in a few days time was that it doesnt print photos on photo or glossy paper!!! i tried every sort of paper and the result was rubish!!..it doesnt even have the option of glossy paper, which really shocked me!!!

i didnt even use the printer much and the screen started flashing 'insert cyan toner'!!...but i found a trick for controlling that...which meant that the toner doesnt actually finish!!

i also experienced the bad transparencies' printing, and was really disappointed. seriously, this printer seemed larger than life... it really made me regret its buying!! Im giving it a star only coz the review required this field to be filled!!!

otherwise, two words,..DONT BUY!!

We received this as a gift from Samsung for our school. I can see why they were wanting to get rid of them! We have had multiple problems with the toner indicator saying that the bottle is full when it isn't even close. The problem is that the sensors are defective from the factory, even though Samsung won't admit to any wrong doing. A serviceman for Samsung said he has replaced dozens of these sensors and the problem magically goes away...

Do a Google search on "samsung clp-500 problems" and you can read away all you want on why you should steer away from this printer, including why cost per page is excessive, as it counts the number of pages to tell you when it is out of toner, not by the amount of toner actually left. When you get the out of toner msg, you have no choice but to replace the expensive toner assy.

I have been going to my local electroncs store many times and looked at all the laser printers on the display. I had see this model on sale/off sale and with a rebate ect... I almost bought it a few times after demo-ing it at the store.. Finally I just Put It In My Cart and took it home. I Dont think it was a mistake at all... I would recomend it...