Customer Reviews

Samsung CLP-610ND Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this mail order from New Egg, not Amazon, but I wanted to review it here among other review sites in order to help others.

First, this printer is my third laser printer over the last 12 years. The first laser I owned was for college. It was a nice, small Okidata. It performed very well.

My second laser was a Samsung 1430, which I still have today and it still prints excellently.

My third laser was the 610ND. Everything this printer says it does, it does, such as printing 21+ pages per minute in both mono and color. The color is unbelievable right out of the box. I used Adobe 1998 for a profile and sent the image at 600DPI (which is the 610's native format) to the printer. The colors were near exact matches to the screen, and as a professional photographer, I have my 23 LCD hardware calibrated. Of course the colors aren't as vibrant as an inkjet or as smooth, but for plain paper 20lb, they are very excellent. The contrast between colors and shades is smooth and I see no banding or streaking. ON top of that, you can also adjust each color's saturation and contrast, among other settings that allow you to dial in the color matching for your screen.

Text is very sharp down to 3 points. The printer is easily set up in less than 10 minutes, including software installation. There are two pieces of software: (1) The driver and (2) The interface software. The interface software allows you to set the printer settings from your computer. Alternately, you can set the same settings on the printers front LCD panel.

I bought this printer exclusively to print tear sheet on plain paper, quickly and anytime I need them, to show models and clients possible poses and to give them ideas about the shoot. Sure, I could have used an inkjet, but inkjets don't shine on plain paper--nor do they duplex and that saves paper. This laser printer does both duplex and prints nicely on plain paper. I was thinking about fast printing and doing it cheaply. It also does card stock up to 48 lbs, cards, envelops, etc, all in color, (plus you get laser sharp text). You also get built in DUPLEX printing, which means you can print on the front and back of the paper automatically.

This brings me to my only problem, and why I will need to return the unit to New Egg. When duplex printing, one of the sides of the paper will have incorrect margins. So one page will print with say 1/2" margins all around, whereas the other side will be offset left and top.

Samsung tech support was pretty fast, about a 2-4 minute wait. A tier two tech asked me a few questions and said it was a hardware problem. They wanted to send a repair tech to my house, which is included in the warranty (14 months if you return the warranty card)--which was good. However, it's only 3 days old! So I told them to hold on to my ticket and let me see how much of a hassle it would be to get New Egg to send me a new one.

New Egg said it was no problem, but I'd need all of the original items plus the original packaging. So I said if you are missing one item that came in the box, or the box itself, the warranty is voided? The CSR rep said pretty much that was true for returns. She explained that Samsung requires those stipulations. So I said that was cool I needed to talk to their manager because it doesn't say anything about that on their warranty page, and that I was going to post our conversation all over the internet, like I'm doing now.

So she said she would check again to see if she could do it just this one time. About 30 seconds later she had the "ok," but said I needed all of the items including the text pages or I would not get a refund. So I dug it all out of the trash for them. Furthermore, they will not cross ship the items. They want me to repurchase the same unit and they will credit my card for the return.

I then asked her if I could buy another unit and when it arrives simply use that units box. She said no because each box has the units serial number on it. This sounded strange to me because the UPS box I'll be sending it back in will not have the serial number either. So it sounded like I was getting somewhat of a run around from New Egg--which you WOULD NOT get from Amazon. On the other hand, she explained that if they return the unit to Samsung with a box that does not match the unit's serial number, they would not refund it for them. Who knows? I initially wanted to buy it from Amazon, but New Egg beat Amazon's price by 100.00US at 299.00. (Sorry Amazon)

Other than the unit not working in duplex mode out of the box, I was very impressed with this printer. I can't see anyone not being satisfied with this printer if you like what it advertises it can do--which it does do, including print speeds and excellent color.

Oh yes, it is network ready also, or you can use a USB cord for single computer use.

UPDATE: 05/07/08

I had a feeling that Samsung Tech Support didn't do a very good job trouble shooting my problem, so I ran through my own trouble shooting steps. I cleared the printer settings and set them back to factory default. This set the margins for duplex printing at 5mm each for left and top. This time it printed with the image perfectly in the center of the page on both pages. I have no idea if there really is a problem using duplex margins or not, but it would seem more intuitive if "0" meant no offset. As it is, 5mm on both equals no offset. So now the printer is completely functional, and I tested more high DPI photo images. The color and smoothness across high contrast images is truly remarkable.

First I give credit to Amazon for taking this product back. The printer looks and works great. The Driver gives seamless printing and fairly quick. The problem is with amount of copies per cartridge. I assumed the starter carts would go quick, but the replacements that I ordered from Amazon would go the 2,000 copies as stated. I got 700 before they ran out. Only 10% coverage per document, if that much. My documents were text. Called Samsung and was told that the carts were possibly re manufactured and that they had problems with Amazon. Checked the carts, they were original Samsung with the seal on the box. Then they said there was something wrong with the printer they would either repair or replace, and could I send the receipt. Did that and called back again. Wait time is longer than expected due to unusually high call volume.......... don't you hate that. I digress. I finally get through to warranty department and a rep said that the number of copies was normal and Samsung would not be able to do anything. He explained that the 2,000 copy on the cartridge is based on 4-5 lines per page. WHAT!!!! When I asked for customer service or a supervisor he stated he is customer service with more power and no one could do anything. I called Amazon to take this piece of crap back. 0.44 cents per copy. I will go back and get an HP at 0.15 cents a copy. Samsung lost a customer in all its lines now. Stay away.

PROS
I just got my printer last week and I love it! The print is nice and crisp, and the multi-purpose tray and duplexing works perfectly. As an Administrative Assistant, I needed a printer that could print envelopes, and labels, as well as standard size paper. It duplexes great too, and the ink does not bleed through the paper.


CONS
So far, none.

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS:
I have not had to replace the toner yet. Samsung includes their full standard yield cartridges with the printer, not starter cartridges. I did research the toner for the printer before I bought it, and Samsung states that the standard cartridges will print approx. 2,000 pages at 5% coverage, and their High Yield cartridges are good for approx. 5,000 pages at 5% coverage. I have been unable to find the high yield cartridges anywhere.

The software included with the printer is very easy to install. It puts an icon in the tray (at the bottom, next to the time) that you can click on to see at a glance how much of each toner you have, troubleshooting, and the printer and driver settings. It also installs an icon on the desktop - Samsung Dr. Printer, which takes you to a Samsung web page that will automatically diagnosis any printer problems for you. Since I haven't had any problems with the printer yet, I have not tried it, but it seems like a good tool to have, as long as it works.

I replaced my previous HP 2600n with this unit which was on sale (one day at Frys) for less than a full set of replacement ink for the HP! The HP also used a proprietary protocol and the Linux drivers couldn't do a very good job with colour.

The CLP-610ND supports PCL5 & 6 which are pretty much open standards. Ubuntu had no problem finding the printer, picking a driver and providing all the features including duplex and 3 print quality settings. If you have a less recent Linux version then it may be detected as the CLP-610 (ie no duplex) but you can download a PPD from LinuxPrinting.org which will give all the functionality.

If you try to send a full page photo at highest quality using PCL then the page will not print due to an out of memory error. I bought some more (DDR2 SODIMM - laptop memory) but discovered that if the memory module is more than 256MB then only the first 128 is recognised which added to the base 128MB gives a total of 256MB. This was sufficient to print a full page photo in medium quality but still runs out at highest quality. If a page contains mixed text and graphics then the memory isn't an issue.

It is also not an issue if you use Samsung's drivers on other operating systems as they use Samsung's proprietary printer language (SPL). There are Samsung Linux Printer drivers which use SPL but I didn't bother with them. There is a Slashdot story mid-2007 about the appalling quality of the driver in terms of what it does on installation to other files and programs. I have no idea if those are fixed.

The printer has a comprehensive web interface which works just fine in Firefox. There is a tab for firmware updating letting you browse and upload new firmware. Samsung however only make the firmware update available as a Windows executable which self extracts and then uploads the firmware. If you were in a Linux or Mac only environment then you'll need a Windows user to run the executable and grab the firmware update out of the temp directory. It is 16MB in size.

Print quality is good. The printer makes a light electrical buzzing sound (annoying in a quiet office) which goes away when it is in sleep mode. For the first print job of the day it does a colour registration procedure which takes a long time (maybe 2 minutes?). If you only print rarely it does add delay to your infrequent jobs. (My old HP used to do the registration after the first print job of the day.)

I bought this printer because I had a 510 that had been pretty good to me. When the 510 needed to much repair, I bought another only this time it didn't work for more than a few months until it started giving me problems.
I like they way the color looks and wanted duplexing, so decided to go with the 610. Only this one wouldn't print straight on the page and kept leaving odd spots where it didn't print. I print a double black boarder around the edge of envelopes and there were lighter spots in the same place in this boarder and it didn't matter what size envelope I used.
Samsung did replace this machine,the new one does print straight but the boarder problems still haunt me.
I have changed the black toner cartridge and it is now not printing in different spot on the boarders. I am going to order another black cartridge and see what happens. Both cartridges I have been using came with the printers.
I also feel that my text pages come out to light. It is almost like the text is being printed to fine. The only page that comes out of my printer looking good is the test page.
These printers do duplex, but don't leave while you have a print job going as you are sure to get a jam. These printers need to be babied.

Wonderful color laser printer, with auto-duplexing. Warms up very quickly, and it prints color pages as fast as black and white pages. Highly recommend for small business and personal use. A bit larger in footprint, but well worth losing the workspace.

At a month old the unit has been fine. Just printed off a 350 Duplex newsletter that went fine. I run this on a Mac network. Had a bit of an issue with mail merge, the formating got all goofy. It comes with 128Mb ram, looking into if this was the issue.
Had to give it an ip address on the network, it's not up to the ease of setup standards that Mac users are used to, but there's no pocket protector in my shirt, I figured it out. I called Samsung, they called me back 4 days later. Tthat's what companies call service these days.

We really like the output, which is sharp and vivid. Small text is easily legible. For a home printer, the Samsung is relatively quiet and fast. The only issue we had was hooking the printer up to a home LAN. We solved this by downloading the latest drivers from Samsung; configuration was straightforward and easy. We found that giving the printer a static IP address in the router helped with some network issues. Auto duplexing works well under Windows Vista with the latest driver installed. Cost of consumables compares well to other brands.

I've never owned a color laser printer before. This would be the first one. This printer is pretty economical on ink which is very important since inks are expensive. I really like the duplex and network printing capabilities...one of the primary reasons why I bought it.

I've used this for 6 months now and haven't had issues yet..knock on wood.

I've owned color laser printers for over 6 years. I had a Minolta Magicolor and Okidata 5100 color laser printer prior to owning the Samsung. The CLP-610ND's picture quality is far superior and the unit is not only faster but quieter as well. The auto duplex feature is a nice plus.

For the price you can't go wrong. Dollar for dollar, I seriously wonder if you could ask for more in a color laser printer.

Buy it. You'll like it.