Samsung CLP-770ND Printer 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. You pay for extra speed, flexibility in paper handling and the robustness to handle higher workloads. The Samsung CLP-770ND is now available for about £500, almost a third of its original price.

This machine is monolithic, having a massive, square-cut case, chamfered off 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 you use the multipurpose tray a slot is opened at the front of the printer to allow paper to feed through.

There's an option to fit a extra 500-sheet paper tray making it a total feed capacity of 1,600 sheets, this could certainly keep a busy office going for a while. . The paper feeds outs to an indentation on the top cover of the printer, but even with its substantial dimensions you still have to raise a support flap to stop pages falling off the back.

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. There are two buttons set next to the display, the select menu options and the back up the menu tree, and there's a four-way ring of navigation control keys with a big OK button in the middle. While the Cancel and Power buttons are placed on the right.

USB and Ethernet ports are positioned at the back right of the printer, which isn't as neat a location as putting them on the back panel.

Setting up the hardware is simple and easy, which involves inserting the four drum and toner cartridges, one per color. The transfer belt engages in the front cover of the printer and you can reach the fuser through a smaller cover on the top.

Print speeds are somewhat lower than those quoted, even when the number of pages of black text was raised to 20 the speed was only 23.5ppm. Printing duplex, which is a standard option, was comparatively quick, with the same 20-side document printing on 10 sheets in 1:31, a speed of 13.19 sides per minute.

The results looked very outstanding, the black text were well-formed with no visible signs of rough edges or toner spatter to distract from a high contrast black and white document. Colour business graphics also proved to be very good, with strong vibrant colours and clear black text. Photos printed at a resolution of 9,600 x 600dpi were also very satisfactory with plenty of detail and accurate colour reproduction. There is detail in darker, shadowed areas, which you can't get in most lasers, plus a wider colour gamut than from most of its competitors.

There are two consumables to consider: the four drum and Samsung CLP-770ND toner cartridges, these will do up to 7,000 pages each (although the machine comes 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 results are fairly decent, compared to the running cost of the £412 canon lbp7200cdn which comes out at 4.86p and 19.14p. Although you can get low operating costs, the majority of of these come from printers that are far more expensive. A 7,000 page cartridge for £75 is a good price, nowadays.

This great and reliable colour laser printer would definitely suit well on busy environments, particularly on large workgroups or small departments, but there is not a lot to get excited about. It's not that fast or loaded with the latest innovations. It doesn't have a USB port on the front, neither is it password protected and you can't use it without a computer.

This delivered excellent results in the most important aspects of a printer. It gives you good quality prints, from straight black text to full-colour images, that plenty of lasers struggle with and it's not expensive to run, given its asking price. All around, you get what counts in this £570 colour heavyweight.


Samsung CLP-770ND printer cartridges are to be found here.