Upon invention, color laser printers would bleed your pockets dry if you would dare to consider acquiring one. Nowadays you can easily find some pretty affordable models like the Samsung CLP-315W color laser printer. It's for sale for a mere 200$.

One great thing about this printer is the piano black gloss design, after having seen more than enough white printers that tend to turn beige after only a couple of months of use. Controls and alerts are also elegantly simple and you will find a single power button on top, and a few led lights that let you know whether ink is low, your wireless connection is down or if paper suddenly gets stuck for no reason at all. It's relatively small and lightweight for a color laser printer and it won't take up a whole desk if someone decides to take it home.

Samsung CLP-315W color laser printer has four individual toner cartridges, one black and three color, that can be found by opening the panel on the faceplate. Since each can be changed separately, its owner won't be forced to replace them all at the same time. This translates, obviously, into money saving.

Laser printers are generally more expensive than inkjet printers. A customer will most of the times be drawn to the cheaper product out of two, by the logic 'they both print just as well, and one is cheaper'. But a laser printer might just be the affordable one in the long run, with much lower printing costs.

According to the manufacturer black printing speed is of up to 16 ppm in A4 while color speed is up to 4 ppm. Realistically speaking, most people report performances of 2-3 ppm in color. This is slighly lower than your average laser color printer, and most users will find it a slow device. In small offices or home offices, that will be just a slight inconvenience, but bigger workgroups will most likely prefer to look for some other product.

Samsung commercializes two separate versions of the CLP315 printer, the standard CLP-315 and the CLP-315W that comes with built in wireless networking apart from the standard USB connection. The CLP-315W does great at printing black text, but not so well as similarly priced printers when the user decides to print photos. One very enjoyable aspect is that you can actually tell the difference in sharpness when you print plain black text.

To sum everything up, good things that this printer has to offer include : compact size and a great, very eye-pleasing glossy design; independent cartridges that will save you money in the long run ; compatibility with basically all operating systems (Windows, Linux and Mac) right out of the box, with all drivers included.

There apparently are just as many bad points to it though, including very slow printing speeds comparing to most of it's rivals. The quality of the prints, while not bad, isn't as great as you might expect it to be either. There's also no duplex printing option and the 150 sheet tray might be ok for some, while others might tend to find it a bit small.