Samsung CLP-610ND

Manufacturer: Samsung Canada

Samsung Canada has been a frequent sponsor and we welcome them into the new year with open arms as we collect a few of their new products this month.

The last color laser printer we reviewed wasn’t the best in the market, but with the new year comes a new beginning and we have high hopes for the CLP-610ND. The CLP-610ND is the latest professional color laser printer in its family. It boasts some spectacular specifications, 21ppm in color, duplex, network capable and low cost.

It should be a barrel of fun to put the CLP-610ND through its paces as I begin my final term of Engineering, a term full of projects and reports that beg to be printed in color.

Package

When the CLP-610ND arrived, it comes packaged in a big box and it’s a heavy printer. UPS requested help in dropping off the printer as it weighed in at a whopping 67.46lb. Samsung takes advantage of the large box size by providing you with images of the printer and displaying some of the features in large font.

Close to the bottom of the sides we see the print speed of the machine. We’re also told that it’s Powerful and is a Network Ready Color Laser Printer. On the top of the box we have the system requirements, a detailed list of the features and how to unpack the printer.

Just in case you were wondering, the printer was manufactured in Korea, right where Samsung is headquartered.

Specifications

It appears that Samsung has revamped their website. The pages load quicker and navigation is just as easy. The CLP-610ND is not the top end color laser printer but it’s a huge step up compared to the CLP-300 I recently reviewed. Here are the features of the printer:

The specifications:

From the get go this printer looks pretty amazing: 20+ pages per minute, first print out in less than 14 seconds, 250 page capacity, 5500 page toner capacity and 50,000 transfer belt life. To the average user, one of these printers will last you a very long time.

Package Contents

From the package pictures, you saw the large size of the printer box. From the specifications, you saw that the printer only measured 43cm*43cm*43cm. So what could be inside this box that’s nearly twice that size? The first thing you’ll see in the box is a thick Styrofoam cover. It’s nearly 2″ thick and protects the 4 toner cartridges from any punctures to the packaging box. The Styrofoam container these 4 toner cartridges sit on is nearly 12″ thick. Below the cartridges is the printer inside a large plastic bag.

Once you pull out the printer, there’s still more to the package contents. Samsung has included the usual registration documents, a copy of the printer menu labels in French if that’s the language of choice, a driver CD, power cord and an air pump. The air pump is used to blow air over the toner cartridges to dislodge any dirt that might be causing streaks on your print out. It’s pretty handy and a much appreciated accessory. Over the life of your printer you will eventually run into to a speck or two, more if you work or live in a dusty environment.

We’ll continue with the physical tour of the printer on the next page.

Product Tour & Physical Installation

Despite the printer’s large size, the product is remarkably simple to familiarize yourself with. We’ll being by looking at the printer straight on, we can see the menu and user control panel at the top edge of the printer and a series of handles and latches to gain access to the printer.

Do you can manually feed sheets into the printer by pulling the cover down. This will feed the paper directly into the paper tray’s roller.

Reaching your hand just below the bottom of the printer let’s you pull out the paper tray. The paper tray holds 250 sheets of paper and can be adjusted to various sizes. I believe the maximum size is 8.5×14″ (legal). The CLP-610ND comes with duplex printing which effectively makes those 250 sheets worth 500 pages of printing. In days where we care so much about the environment, I think every printer should print in duplex.

Returning to the product tour, here is a photo of the user control panel. It’s pretty simple and that’s the way it should be for a laser printer. You only really need a big stop button to kill the print job and some basic navigation keys to change printer settings. Even that last bit is optional given the fact that the CLP-610ND is a network printer and the configuration can be done online.

The sides of the printer are pretty boring, there are some cooling vents and an indented slot to lift the printer but that’s about it. On one side there is the power switch, network port, USB port and auxiliary paper tray connection port.

On the backside of the printer everything is covered up to keep prying hands out. I suspect we have the motherboard, RAM and NIC circuits tucked behind the sheetmetal. The power plug and printer label are located at the bottom corner of the back.

Returning to the top of the printer, just behind the user control panel is the paper output tray. The output tray has a capacity of 200 pages. If you recall the specifications, the paper tray holds 250 pages. By simple math, if you send a 250 page document out for printing, make sure you pick it up at the half way point or else you’ll find a stack of mixed up sheets on the floor.

Turning the printer over to its side, gives a good look at the bottom. The printer is supported on 4 points. The front two points are rubber tipped to prevent sliding and the back two are made of hard plastic.

Accessing the insides of your printer should not be a scary task. You’ll need to do it to change toner cartridges, transfer belts and to pull out the occasional paper jam. After over 1000 print jobs, I have not yet had a single paper jam – a true testament to the fine engineering of the CLP-610ND. All access ways are simple to get to, you find the lever and lift. Starting at the top, the entire cover lifts up. I haven’t quite figured out what this does, apart from the fact that paper comes out of here. It looks like a heating element of some sorts requiring 110V. As soon as I figure out what this is, I’ll let everyone know.

Pulling the cover down from the front of the printer reveals the toner storage locations and the image transfer belt. The instructions on how to change the install the toner is fixed to the inside of the cover for convenience. The process is quite simple, take the toner of choice, and slide it into the appropriate color tray. From top to bottom, it goes Black, Blue, Magenta, Cyan. Never touch the toner cartridges by the green roller. It’s a highly sensitive surface that determines where toner needs to be applied on your sheet.

Once you close the cover up and plug in the necessary cable for power and printer communication, you’re ready to start installing the drivers and using the printer. From this brief overview, you can tell that operating and maintain the printer is fairly simple. There aren’t many places for paper to get jammed and getting access to everything is fairly simple.

Software Installation

Software installation is quite simple with the CLP-610. Once you pop the driver CD into the optical drive, there’s next to no thinking left. You select the language you want (English), the type of installation you want and the location of your printer, wait for the system to locate your selected printer, select the printer you want to install drivers for if you have more than one, wait for the installation to complete and register or print a test page at the end.

You’ll be done in a matter of minutes! If you wish, there are many software add-ons you can download for administering your printer.

If you can’t remember the IP of the printer, you can download and install a web-admin service. It does the same thing as typing in the IP of the printer into your favourite browser.

From the web management software, you can monitor the device and check different statistics. I’m always interested in seeing how many pages the printer has printed.

From the Windows Taskbar, you can quickly view the status of the printer’s toner levels through a simple applet installed earlier. You can also vary the printer settings and driver settings.

One feature I particularly like is the default enabling of duplex. This way you’re forced to print single sided if that’s what you want. Too often you forget you want to print duplex to save paper but you have already pressed the print button.Overall, there aren’t many negative comments about the software installation and configuration for this printer. After years of experience, Samsung has been able to get this part completed as elegantly as possible.

Performance & Finance Calculation

The performance of a printer is really up to your personal taste. If you don’t like the print job, then the printer has failed you. If you do like the quality and like the rate it is completing the print job, then the printer is a success. For me, the CLP-610ND did much better than the CLP-300 that I reviewed last year. The print outs from this printer were crisp and clean. There were no streaks in the pictures and the overall quality was breathtaking.

Text

Pictures Print Speed

From a speed performance, the CLP-610ND performed very close to what it was rated at, at least the rating of the sticker on the physical product. If you recall, the label on the printer indicated 21 pages per minute whereas the website said 25 pages per minute. A rate of 21 pages per minute in color is very respectable.

Single Sided

Duplex

Note that the page per minute count began after the first page was ejected. This was to eliminate the warmup time.

Financial Analysis

We’ll start you off with some basic pricing for different CLP-610(ND) products.

The printer:

CLP-610ND:

Toner 5k Yield:
Color (Cyan, Yellow, Magenta): $133.63
Black (5.5K Yield)k: 113.07

Transfer belt (50K images): $211.70

If you have to replace the transfer belt, which means you’ve printed 50K images, I’ll assume that’s the equivalent of 50,000 pages, you must have at least purchased another 7 to 8 toner cartridges (7.63 to be precise). This would have cost you an additional 863 dollars plus the cost of paper, the original printer and the cost of electricity. Excluding the price of electricity and considering the cost of 50,000 sheets to be 500 dollars, it will be just over 1700 dollars worth of expenses before you need to change the transfer belt. At 50K pages, you need to whether or not you can even find the printer still. Depending on your frequency of use, it could be 5 to 10 years from now. A typical copy store will charge as low as 4 cents a page for prints exceeding 10K pages. That’s unlikely to ever happen. A black and white page will more likely be around 7 centers and color at 50 centers. If we assume 10 cents to cover for the occasional color page, a print job of 50K will cost $5,000. This clearly shows the advantages of a color print if you intend on doing a lot of printing. For me in school, it’s definitely worth it. In the 2 months that I’ve had the printer, I have printed 1300 pages. That itself is a quarter of the printer’s MSRP!

Conclusion

The Samsung CLP-610ND is an affordable option to the high end CLP-650 and a great replacement to the lifeless CLP-300. Priced at $150.00 more than the CLP-300, you won’t be disappointed in what you pay for. First off, you get built in network capability. This is a must have for any business! The second and more important aspect of the CLP-610ND is the quality and speed of each print job. The self-calibration increases some print jobs but ensures you get top quality every time. At 21 pages per minute, you can have your report in your boss’ hand in no time.

The CLP-610 doesn’t come without some minor flaws. The start up time is pretty long and even longer if you need to wait for the printer to come to life after being cold for a few hours. For most jobs, you’ll be waiting for the printer to warmup rather than the print to come out. This minor imperfection is masked by the great successes and ease of use.

For any small business of family that does tons of printing with a demand of color, this printer is definitely one to consider.

Advantages

Reasonably priced

Network ready, duplex ready

Great quality

Fast print jobs

Disadvantages

Takes time to warm up

Waiting for multifunction unit with this quality

Tags: CLP-610ND, color laser printer, printer, Review, Samsung