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Samsung CLP-510n Color Laser Printer


Date
: 04/22/05 – 02:06:33 AM

Author
:

Category
: Printers

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: Samsung Electronics
Price: $484.25 (Newegg)

Overclockers Online recently reviewed the CLP-550's printers from Samsung, with a great review by Simon on two of Samsung's latest laser printers. Today we bring you the latest model in the CLP-500 series by Samsung: the CLP-510n.

This printer is very similar to those reviewed by Simon, again the link is here, so we are going to focus on the changes that Samsung made, and how they will affect you and the performance of the printer.

Page 2 : Package

The CLP-510n came in the notoriously large printer box. Weighing in at about 85lbs, the box didn't make it in much further than the front door.

Opening the box you will be greeted with the 4 toners used in the printer: black, yellow, magenta, and cyan. Removing the toners reveals the printer itself, and the manuals to the left side of the printer. Once we pull all the stuff out of the box, you can get a better view.

Let's take a closer look at the numbers and features and see what Samsung has changed.

Page 3 : Specifications

A list of the specifications as per Samsung:

The first noticeable difference between the specs of the CLP-550's and the CLP-510n we're looking at today is the speed. The CLP-550's were rated at 21ppm mono, and 5ppm color; the CLP-510n is rated at 25ppm mono, and 7ppm color. The duplex speed was also changed to reflect this. The first page out time has also been adjusted in this new model, down to 13 seconds for mono, and 21 seconds for color, shedding between 2 and 3 seconds off of the time.

The next difference in the specifications comes at the processor. It would appear that Samsung has taken the PowerPC processor out of this model, and replaced it with their own Samsung SPGPm processor. With the processor being different, Samsung has also changed the recognized language to the printer, from the previous PCL6 and PS3 with the CLP-550's, to now SPL-C (Samsung Printer Language Color).

Most of the rest of the specifications are the same, the higher CLP-550's can hold almost double the ram that the CLP-510n can, the newer CLP-510n is rated at 1db higher than its predecessors, and it's power consumptions have been changed slightly.

The CLP-550's were rated at:

where as the CLP-510n is now:

Features

Since the specifications of the CLP-510n are identical to the CLP-550's that Simon reviewed, we are just going to provide a link to them which you can browse through if you're interested! You can find the specifications here.

We've compared the numbers and the facts about the two, let's see what has changed about the exterior to the printer.

Page 4 : CLP-510n Walk-Around

Much of the exterior of this printer is similar to that of the CLP-550's. The only noteable difference I could find is that the CLP-510n no longer has an LPT Parallel Port, and the color of the user control panel has changed.

Here is the walk around:

Towards the bottom of the front, we can see the paper tray.

The only hardware installation required by the CLP-510n now is installing the toner cartridge.

One very nice thing about these toners is that they have a very tiny footprint, meaning they are pretty small, and many of them can be stored in a small area.

Simon was pretty careful about the imaging unit in his reviews, which you can see in the above picture, right below the toners (the green piece). However I am not as nice :) Plus I think if the imaging unit was so sensitive, Samsung would not position it in places that would constantly be exposed to light, such as the toner access area. If they did, well that's another story. So since I'm not as nice of a guy, let's get a better look at the imaging unit!

Finally once you get all of the toners installed, it will look something like this.

The back of the printer is not too exciting…

…however it does hold the access door to some of the electronic boards for the printer, including access to add extra ram as well as IO cards.

Page 5 : Installation/Testing

The installation of the CLP-510n is exactly like the CLP-550's. You can use a USB connection, or as I am going to do setup the printer on my network. For the installation, we are going to follow about the exact steps as Simon did here for the CLP-550's with the only exception of a different driver probably.

Once we get the printer set up, now comes the fun part! Let's take the CLP-510n for a test drive and see how it does versus the CLP-550's.

For the testing, I am going to use the same test documents Simon used. The black and white test document can be founder here which is 25 pages of pure black and white text. The color document is here which is 8 pages of color text.

So, everything is set in place… let's take a look at the test results!

25 pages, black text @ 63 seconds (or 23.81 pages per minute)
8 pages, color text @ 85 seconds (or 5.65 pages per minute)

Next we can take a look at the duplex printing.

25 pages, duplex, black text @ 137 seconds (or 10.95 pages per minute)
8 pages, duplex, color text @ 92 seconds (or 5.22 pages per minute)

The close-ups of the text pages show the quality of printed text, which has no signs of errors or unconformities.

Overall the speeds are just under the claimed 25ppm black and 6ppm color. This could be due to errors in my timing, or even different measurement points as when the paper lands in the tray vs. when the paper is being ejected. Overall the claimed speeds are very close to the actual times I recorded. The duplex times also fall into the same category; however there is something very interesting about the color duplex printing.

The black duplex printing takes about double the time to print, which makes perfect sense. However, the duplex printing of color pages takes almost the identical amount of time to print single sided color and duplex color! I am not quite sure why this is, but it is a very interesting occurrence. The same numbers are reflected both in Simon's review of the CLP-550's and in the specifications previously stated.

Now we've taken a look at the speeds for printing text documents, let's take a look at full page picture quality. The test file that we are going to use is here.

Taking a close look at the image quality it is pretty good. Not "picture perfect" as Simon also found in his review. The colors are a little off, and every now and then you can see color inconsistencies caused by the toners. These are more noticeable in the full page pictures, however were not noticeable in smaller images. Overall though, pictures printed on this printer would look decent displayed on a wall or in a presentation.

Page 6 : Conclusion

Overall this series of Samsung CLP-500's seem to be an awesome series of color laser printers. It looks like Samsung has made a couple of speed enhancements to the CLP-510n over the CLP-550's. A processor change and perhaps some additional hardware changes to improve this already great printer series.

Since this printer is most likely aimed at businesses, it will definitely be a top contender for it's position as #1 printer in the office. Not only does it supply excellent print quality and speed for a color laser printer. Compared to well known brands such as HP, in the same price range, the CLP-510n out-performs the HP by 10 pages per minute in black and white, and 2 pages per minute in color.

The initial cost of the printer is fairly high (actually low for color laser printers) but maintenance and everyday usage of this printer is very affordable. Toner cartridges run about $100 to $120 for the black cartridge and color cartridges respectively.

Overall it appears as though Samsung has a great line of color printers here. The image quality is quite nice as well as the speed, a perfect combination!

Advantages

- Very affordable
- Good image quality
- Great speed

Disadvantages

- Image quality/colors are not "picture perfect"

A huge thanks go Samsung for providing this printer to us.