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Entered CNET Catalog: 01/27/2005
SKU: CLP-510N/XAA
Manufacturer: Samsung
Manufacturer description
Color means impact and Samsung's CLP-510N ensures you are able to achieve this with vibrant coolers, vivid images, and sharp text up to 1, 200 x 1, 200 dpi resolution, even on special media, such as envelopes, labels, and cardstock. The CLP-510N not only meets your color needs, but exceeds them! Save paper effortlessly with duplex printing. Everyday documents can be output on both sides of the page with the CLP-510N's standard duplex printing solution. With this cost-saving function, you can communicate efficiently and reduce paper consumption. Pay less for more! You can have a color laser printer at a price lower than some B&W laser printers, without sacrificing printing speed or quality. Samsung's CLP-510N prints up to 24 ppm in B&W and 6 ppm in color, yet cost less than most competitors. So go ahead, print in color! Samsung's industry leading SPGPm processor and standard 64 MB of RAM (expandable to 192 MB) allow you to print complex multi-page documents or images at a fast 24 ppm B&W or 6 ppm in color. Bottlenecks will be a thing of the past with the swift transfer rates of the ultra-fast USB 2.0 interface. Samsung's CLP-510N is designed to help you increase performance with easy connectivity. Optional dual wired/wireless network printing on CLP-510N provides you with an effortless, efficient and productive alternative. Get the compatibility you require, ranging from Windows to Linux and even Macintosh (Ver. 10.3x). Get the quiet performance you desire with the amazingly low noise level of 49 dBA during color printing.Product summary
The good: Inexpensive; includes duplexer and Ethernet interface; fast text printing.
The bad: Mediocre text quality; control panel and design are confusing.
The bottom line: Despite its less-than-perfect text quality, we consider this to be one of the best all-around deals for an affordable color laser.
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 03/25/2005
We found the CLP-510N's control panel puzzling, and we think it may baffle some users. The two-line, unlit text LCD is hard to read in a room without bright lighting, much like the displays of the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL and the HP 3550. Worse, though, the buttons for navigating the menus don't seem hierarchical, because the menus appear on the LCD as one long strip of items. We got frustrated after repeatedly configuring settings such as the sleep time, only to find that they had reverted to defaults because we hadn't figured out how to lock in our changes. And we had trouble simply drilling down to some menu items, such as the IP address setting. You can print a menu map, but it doesn't show all the layers or explain how to move through the hierarchy.
The toner cartridges are easy to change, thankfully, as they slide smoothly into the printer's left side. But we found the CLP-510N's mechanical design confusing at times. For example, to open the top of the machine and clear paper jams or expose the drum and the transfer belt, you have to first open the left side of the printer. The belt and drum have green handles to signal that you can pull them, but the latches that hold those components in place are green and purple, which is odd.
For a small, simple color laser printer, the Samsung CLP-510N provides respectable paper handling. Both CLP-510 models include a duplexer for double-sided printing, making it easy to print booklets and save paper. If you must have a duplexer, consider that the CLP-510 comes with one for an already-low price, whereas duplexers on competing color laser printers can sometimes double the printer's price: $320 for the Okidata Oki C5200n, $400 for the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL, and a whopping $1,000 for the Brother HL-2700CN. A 500-sheet optional paper tray costs $300, which is low compared to the $450 demanded by Okidata and the $550 by Brother.The Samsung CLP-510N's driver offers useful capabilities. To start, it can reduce and print several pages on one sheet to create booklets or blow up one page onto several sheets to make a poster. You can pick separate paper sources for the first page and subsequent pages to create reports with distinct covers. You can also control brightness, saturation, contrast, and color tones individually; another driver window lets you tweak contrast and brightness separately for light and dark tones. However, the watermark feature can put the watermark only dead center on the page and in only a few basic colors.
Installing the CLP-510N was a simple matter of connecting the printer's USB cable to our Windows XP machine, canceling the Add Printer wizard, and popping in the driver CD. Equipping the CLP-510 with 802.11 wireless support takes some planning. The model CNET tested, the CLP-510N, includes an Ethernet NIC, but for Wi-Fi, you'll have to buy the nonnetworked CLP-510, then add a $250 combination Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking card. You can't retrofit the 510N with Wi-Fi or get Wi-Fi without Ethernet. Both models include 64MB of memory and one empty slot to expand up to 192MB, but Samsung charges a steep $500 for the maximum RAM; you'd do better to add your own 100-pin standard DIMM from another supplier.
The CLP-510's toner cartridges come in two sizes, and you'll have to buy them soon after setting up the printer, which ships with the smaller-size cartridge. The larger-size toner cartridge prices out affordably, especially for color: about 2 cents per page of black text and about 11 cents per page of color, including the belt and drum. To compare, the Okidata Oki C5200n runs 2.5 cents for black and 14.1 cents for color; the Konica Minolta 2430DL averages 2.2 cents black and 11.8 cents color; and the HP Color LaserJet 3550 costs 2.4 cents black and 12.2 cents color, according to vendor estimates.
Speed
The Samsung CLP-510N trotted through text at almost 17.9 pages per minute (ppm), about 2ppm faster than the average of recent low-price color lasers, and it printed our monochrome graphics test documents at almost the same speed, or 17.5 ppm, which is 3.5ppm faster than its cohorts' average. It fell behind a bit when printing color--for example, it printed our color graphics test files at 5.3ppm, while the cohorts averaged 7.1ppm. All in all, that's pretty decent performance for such an inexpensive device.
(pages per minute)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Black text |
Quality
Black text quality proved to be our principal disappointment with the Samsung CLP-510N. Its text came out looking respectably black but noticeably fuzzy or spattery--nowhere as bad as an inkjet but still not as crisp as we expect from a color laser these days. With grayscale graphics, it captured subtle variations in shades surprisingly well and displayed good detail. Too much red permeated our color test photos, making blue look purple and pale pink skin look wind-burned, but a diligent user could probably correct that tone problem through the printer driver. In other ways, the color graphics looked mostly good, with clean details, despite jagged edges in shaded areas.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
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Color graphics | |
Color text | |
Black graphics | |
Black text |
Click here to learn more about how CNET Labs tests printers. The Samsung CLP-510N provides good support, though with some serious flaws. The CLP-510N comes with lifetime free, toll-free tech support, available during business hours, weekdays 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. PT, and a year of warranty coverage that includes onsite service. You can buy warranty extensions, but they don't come cheap: an extra year costs $280, a total of three years runs $395, and you'll pay $509 for four years.
Fortunately, the 250-page PDF manual on CD is informative, because the printed documentation packed in the box is atrocious. You get a setup poster with sparse detail repeated in many languages, and a postcard-size accordion-fold document, designed to live inside a pouch attached to the printer, that provides a few confusing end-user instructions in tiny type.
Samsung's Web site offers a support section with manual and driver downloads, and a "Dr. Printer" page to debug your printer setup and update your drivers; it requires letting Samsung download and run an application on your PC, however. The Web site's FAQs page had no CLP-510-specific information when we searched it, and the Parts And Accessories button links to a third-party vendor that wasn't carrying parts for the CLP-510. Between e-mail to Samsung's tech support and e-mail to Samsung's public relations agency, we got two different stories on how to equip the printer with an extra paper tray. We hope Samsung will have ironed out those wrinkles before you read this.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 User Rating: 
8/10
Excellent Printer
Pros: Inexpensive, good quality printing, toner lasts long time.
Cons: Toner for this printer is expensive
User Rating: 
1/10
Not worth the trouble
Pros: Duplexing, ok print quality.
Cons: Constant problems with sensors, bad design, size, weight, noise.
The good things about the printer are that it does duplexing and the print quality is reasonable. However these have been outweighed by the negative aspects so I would definitely NOT recommend it to anyone.
User Rating: 
7/10
Good value for the price.
Pros: Toner cartridges both new and remanfactured are inexpensive compared to other laser printers in same price range. Refill kits for toner cartridges are simple and easy to use also.
Cons: When printing a large number of pages, machine starts to make weird noises that sound like parts rubbing together or a squeaky fan belt on a vehicle. LCS program screen is hard to follow and understand.
User Rating: 1/10
Landfill Fodder
Pros: It will make you buy somebody elses printer
Cons: Support, quality, performance
User Rating: 
9/10
Wow...What a Deal!
Pros: great photos...fast...duplexer....e xtra paper tray.....cheap consumables....
Cons: none yet.....
User Rating: 
2/10
This printer isn't worth the box it was packaged in!
Pros: its fast for the quality
Cons: jams frequently, smells badly, not user friendly
User Rating: 8/10
Best color laser for the money-about $299 online
Pros: Cheaper than inkjet, saves paper wih duplexer, doesnt smudge with water
Cons: none really, like all laser printers, toner cartriges initially cost more than ink
Even if you just buy everything via online and dont refil etc, compared to inkjets this is about $0.05 a page ($0.02 if u refill your own cartridges) as opposedto abouyt $0.95 per page for inkjet.
User Rating: 2/10
Don't buy unless printer is demonstrated producing a good result
Pros: Good quality if you get a good one
Cons: Poor support from manufacturer
The one I bought was faulty - hardly any difference between a test print and a blank sheet of paper.
Samsung support suggested the toner cartridges were probably faulty, and I should buy new ones. If I called an engineer out to fix it, they would charge me if it turned out to be a problem with the toners. I don't know if other manufacturers would try this, but I think it is outrageous. They won't take it back as faulty either! Doesn't even make a good door stop.
User Rating: 
5/10
Did workup to my expectation
Pros: fast, economical
Cons: bullky, can't handle special papers
When I bought mine, the company here in Seoul did not include internet port, or ethernet card
User Rating: 8/10
Very happy with my purchase
Pros: Built-In-Duplexer, Good Graphics Quality, Reasonable Print Speed
Cons: Not too good with photos, text not razor sharp
In my opinion, the CLP-510 is a great buy, it includes a duplexer, prints rather fast and is affordable. The worries I had about text quality were rather unfounded. Text is slightly soft looking, but in my opinion it is better than the best inkjets printing on paper. Graphics print vibrant and sharp, although a little on the warm side. However, if you had the time to write a damning review I feel that the time would be better spent just tweaking the colour controls of the print driver. The only major shortcoming i experienced is the horrible photo printouts. However, as most of us know, laser printers are never good at printing photos.
So, if you want an "eco-friendly" printer, are not extremely fussy about text quality, print lots of graphics and not many photos, I would encourage you to get one of these. For a home/small office, its just a great buy.
User Rating: 1/10
Bad color quality toner chip on page count
Pros: duplex and color at low cost
Cons: Bad Color Quality and Toner on Page count
User Rating: 9/10
Excellent printer for less than $500
Pros: Duplex printing, 64mb memory, decent color/image output
Cons: Bulky, text printing isn't as precise compared to its competitors
User Rating: 8/10
Best Value in its class and loaded with features
Pros: Features: duplexing, booklets, multi-pages up, quiet
Cons: Print quality is about the same as inkjet
User Rating: 9/10
Good Bang for the buck
Pros: Cheap, easy network setup, no problems yet
Cons: The cartridges are expensive
Oh, we have had decent color output for flyers.
User Rating: 
3/10
Disappointed
Pros: quiet when not in use
Cons: quality, speed - poor, poor value
The CLP-550N was at such a competitive price I hunted for it with 3 of my suppliers - and 7 weeks later there were still no confirmed stock of the printer. I eventually opted for the CLP-510, but I imagine the 510, 510N, 550 and 550N are all the same printer but with NICs and more memory. Toms Hardware had this rated very well and I read some other reviews that gave this printer a good rating. We have a Xerox Phaser 7300 and Epson Aculaser - and the Epson is an old, dying printer - and both give results worthy of a colour laser printer.
This Samsung printer is so bad, I have tried to get my supplier to take it off me and sent a written letter to Samsung (because they don't handle complaints over the telephone, apparently). I've had no response yet but we are after getting our money back for this - it's not even worth a dollar to me - not with the cost of the cartridges to replace! We might as well have purchased a top of the range inkjet and still had better results than this!
To clarify, the ink DOES drop on the paper (does not guarantee your prints will be CLEAN), the text quality is poor (SHODDY) - far from what I expect from a colour printer, the contrast is poor, the default brightness isn't right - the colours aren't sharp and give the look of "bleeding" - but there isn't any - it's just the way the printer drops the ink on the page. You really get better results from inkjets these days and I can't believe this printer is out for sale on the market. Even the printing speed isn't impressive!
The main reason I avoided HP (comparable printer cost) was because of the cost of replacement parts. Kyocera have been fantastic printers for black and white prints. What can I say ... if we can get rid of this we will go for an HP or another Epson Aculaser. Very, very disappointed, Samsung - and disappointed with all the magazines and web-sites that rated this printer so highly!
BEWARE!
User Rating: 8/10
I was worried, but glad I made the purchase...
Pros: Good quality printing, very fast for the price
Cons: Toner cost is high, initial cartridges not that full
I must say that I am very impressed. Perhaps my expectations were pretty low due to the user reviews, but as a large user of color laser jets I think one rates among the best that I have used - especially for a home office/small business environment. My office primarily uses the large-volume HP color LaserJet printers and they are great, but they were well out of my cost range for my house. This seemed like cost-effective answer to my problem of not wanting to waste ink-jet cost or time to print some highly-graphical briefings.
Overall, I have not found any real problems with the system yet. In my opinion, I don't even have a problem with the black text printing that CNET found and that some of the users complain about, but I've only had it a short time. On the graphics side, it printed great and looked great - especially on the more brilliant white paper. I am perhaps most impressed with the speed of the printer. I printed out a 20 page briefing which is mostly just Photoshop pictures, so lots of color and graphics, and it only took a few minutes!!
I would definitely recommend this printer for someone looking for a low-volume home solution.
User Rating: 1/10
A $400 hunk of junk
Pros: They took it back without charging 15% restocking fee
Cons: Slowest machine ever used and black text is horrific
User Rating: 3/10
Maybe okay for plain paper
Pros: Relatively inexpensive
Cons: Can't print on glossy or matte finish laser brochure papers
User Rating: 1/10
Toner has chip based on page count
Pros: No pro's in my opinion.
Cons: Read My opinion
User Rating: 9/10
Samsung CPL-510 a winner!
Pros: Low cost, Duplex, handles heavy paper, good output
Cons: Heavy, price per page not the lowest
User Rating: 8/10
Very good printer for personal use (couldn't ask for better).
Pros: The printer provides good colour quality, acceptable black quality, and a built-in duplexer.
Cons: Just the black text quality. It was fuzzy around the edges wth a somewhat splattered look to it.
User Rating: 8/10
For $350 at Sam's Club, it's quite a bargain
Pros: Fast enough for the price, color is decent (but not spectacular), network and duplexing capabilities are included.
Cons: Graphic quality could be better, not as easy for novices to setup as other brands.
User Rating: 8/10
Great value, good features
Pros: Out-of-box duplexing, low cost, network included, wireless networking available (additional cost)
Cons: Toner cart: 1/2 full on new printer and new set cost is over $450 - but that is for over 7000 sheetes, accdg to Samsung
The quality for the printer is good, and the color neede a bit of tweaking for correct rendition, but all in all- this printer is a LOT, LOT cheaper than an ink-jet, with good quality.
A great choice for any office that distributes color flyers and material - the auto-duplex feature and optional 2nd paper tray make this a great deal for most companies.
To improve this printer, Samsung need to get the color match a bit closer and have the toner available at a cost of under $100 per cartrige for the color units. I can get the color carts. refilled for less than $60 each locally (in the Kansas City metro area).
Overall, a fine printer with a lot of features.
User Rating: 
4/10
Do not buy this printer unless you actually see the printed samples and decide that their mediocre q
Pros: Low priced; fast; includes built-in duplex unit
Cons: Terrible print quality
User Rating: 8/10
Very Pleased
Pros: Inexpensive, Good Output Quality, Built In Duplex
Cons: Some Jams - nothing serious
One pleasant surprise is the speed at which the printer spits out finished work. Especially with black and white printing the CLP-510 is very quick.
For this kind of money, it is a complete no brainer.
User Rating: 9/10
excellent color laser printer for a reasonable price
Pros: good color quality on plain paper. may be administrated from any computer with a web browser.
Cons: there is no help in the web interface
for a reasonable price. the printer was
easy to setup. once an ip address was
entered via the menu the rest of the
setup was extremely easy using the web interface.
my daugther, a computer graphics and
business communication degree, tested
the printer with images taken on her
canon powershot a520. the quality was
very good on plain paper.
the printer worked right off from 2 imacs
and the 1 emac. the samsumg provided drivers
for linux work excellent under debian sarge.
i would recommend this printer to everyone
who needs to print in color. it is less
expensive to operate than any ink jet
printer when you compare the cost of toner
and ink cartridges.
having duplex printing standard is a huge
plus. this saves on paper cost.
User Rating: 2/10
Do your homework before you think about buying this printer
Pros: Network, good mono text output
Cons: Extremely poor color text and photo output
User Rating: 9/10
Great workgroup printer, Reasonably fast network color without breaking the bank.
Pros: Fairly inexpensive toner cartridges and automatic duplexing at no extra charge.
Cons: Not as fast for color as black and white, but sufficient for most small offices.
