Samsung CLP-770ND Toner Review

Colour laser printers start at around £150, however the price suddenly increases as you as soon as you move up from soho to the workgroup models. What you get is faster printing speed, paper handling flexibility and the capability to manage higher workloads. When you get to £500 to £600 area, Samsung's CLP -770ND is on the menu, discounted from a fairly silly list price of £1,449.

This is a monolithic machine, having a massive, square-cut case, beveled at the front to give way for the control panel plus a 500 sheet paper tray together with a fold down 100 sheet multipurpose tray. When the multipurpose tray is lowered a slot is opened at the front of the printer to let the paper feed through.

It is also possible to fit two further 500 sheet paper trays bringing the total capacity up to 1,600 sheets.. The paper feeds outs to an indentation on the top cover of the printer, considering the size of the machine it seems a little surprising that it is necessary to raise a support flap to hold the printed paper

The control panel is simple, but effective, with a 4-line by 16-character, backlit LCD display showing all status messages. Since the display is fully bitmapped, it can show text and graphics efficiently. Two buttons set beside the screen, the select menu options and back up the menu tree, and there is a 4-way ring of navigation control keys with a substantial OK button in the middle. At the right of this are the Cancel and Power buttons.

The USB and Ethernet port is positioned at the right-hand side of the printer, which isn't as ideal as placing them on the back panel.

Hardware setup is straightforward, all you have to do is install the four toner cartridges. The transfer belt engages in the front cover of the printer and you can reach the fuser via a smaller cover on the top.

Increasing the number of pages to 20 on a black text test also increased the print speed to 23.5ppm, still some way short of the quoted speed. On standard option, printing duplex was relatively quick getting the same 20-side document printing 10 sheets in 1:31, and a speed of 13.19 sides per minute.

The printed results were very good with clear black text on a mono document. The colour business graphics are also well produced, having strong, solid colours and exceptional black text registration over colour. From what Samsung claims, the photo reproduction has an improved resolution of 9,600 x 600dpi, which results to a much better colour reproduction. There's detail in darker, shadowed areas, which a lot of laser printers don't reproduce, plus a wider colour gamut compared to most of its competition.

There's two consumables to consider in the CLP-770ND: the four drum and toner cartridges, these will do up to 7,000 pages each (although the machine is supplied with 3,500-page starter cartridges) and a 50,000-page transfer belt. The total cost is 2.13p for the black page and 7.33p for colour. Both these numbers are fairly decent, in comparison the £412 Canon LPB7200CDN work out at 4.86p and 19.4p. Even though you can get low working costs, the majority of of these come from printers with a much higher selling price. A 7,000 page cartridge for £75 is a good price, right now.

This great and reliable colour laser printer would definitely suit well on busy environments, particularly on large workgroups or small departments, however there is not a lot to look forward to. It isn't that fast or filled with the latest innovations. It lacks a USB port on the front panel, or password-protected, walk-up print capability.

However, perhaps more importantly, it did deliver in what many would consider to be the most important areas for a printer. It gives top quality prints, from straight black text through to full-colour photographs, which plenty of lasers have trouble with and also the printing costs is low considering its listed price.. In general, you get your every penny's worth with this £570 colour heavyweight.


Samsung CLP-770ND toner cartridges are available here.