One thing Samsung seems to be pretty good at? Providing affordable laser printers, be it color or monochrome. They are actually doing better than other brands such as HP or Ricoh. Apparently, their theory that they should provide exactly what the consumer is looking for, followed by carefully studying what the consumer requires, is really paying off.



The starter cartridges it comes with will offer just about 2000 pages for black and 1500 pages for color. This means that if you have a small office you'll end up changing them in the shortest time possible. If for some reason you've purchased this for home however, and you don't need serious printing, the 2000 pages will do well for you. While the full cartridges will last for 7000 pages (mono) and 5000 pages (color) they are unreasonably expensive.

Samsung should have payed a bit more attention to what the consumer needs in this case, as they failed to provide networking, on a printer that targets small offices. This is sort of counter intuitive and will probably cut the target audience by at least half. They do come as an extra (both Ethernet and wireless) but one wonders why you'd have to spend more money to equip this with networking when you can buy a printer that provides that off the shelf.

Bottom line is, all you'll be getting with the CLP-500 is USB 2.0 (no cable included so you have to buy your own). Setting up the printer is very easy though, as in the case of most Samsung products. Right after you purchase an USB cable, all you have to do is plug the printer in, and that's about it.

Fully equipped with cartridges it will weigh a 'mere' 35 kg. When you consider where you're going to be placing it also consider that it measures 51 x 47 x 40.5 cm. The Samsung CLP-500 printer could be called bulky but to some extent most color laser printers that were designed for office use are larger as size. As for paper capacity, you'll be getting a 250 sheet output tray on the top of the device, and 250 sheet input tray. There's also an extra 500 sheet input tray available for purchase for users that want to increase paper capacity. A multipurpose tray is on the right side of the printer but it will somewhat disapoint with it's capacity of only 10 sheets of media. Media supported includes envelopes, labels or transparencies.

On the bright side the printer comes with a duplexer, so printing on both sides of the paper will be easy and convenient and you'll be saving up on paper and time. Speed is pretty average, 20 pages per minute for monochrome and 5 pages per minute for printing color in A4. Quality is good towards great. The graphics quality is somewhat better than the text but both are satisfactory. So, if a user is looking for an affordable color laser printer that can produce good quality prints and also includes a duplexer, the Samsung CLP-500 printer is a very good idea. However, people that require a huge output of paper should look somewhere else, as running costs may become higher than the initial buying cost.