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.
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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.
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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.
