Samsung CLP 770ND toner cartridge

The Samsung CLP 770ND colour laser printer uses four individual colour toner cartridges with a capacity of 7,000 pages @ 5% coverage. We list all these cartridges here at discount prices.

Samsung CLP-770ND Review

The price for 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. What you get is faster printing speed, paper handling flexibility and the capability to manage higher workloads. The Samsung CLP-770ND is on the menu when you reach the £500 to £600 price range, reduced from its very silly initial price of £1,449.

This machine is monolithic, with a big, square-cut case, chamfered off at the front to allow for the control panel and with a slightly peculiar arrangement of main 500-sheet paper tray and fold-down 100-sheet multipurpose tray. As you fold down the multipurpose tray, it opens a slot in the front of the machine for the 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 despite its large size you will still need to raise a support flap to prevent the pages from falling off the back

The plain but effective control panel features a 4-line by 16-character and a backlit LCD display screen showing all status messages. Text and graphics are displayed clearly. Two buttons set next to the screen, the select menu options and back up the menu tree, and there is a 4-way ring of navigation buttons with a big OK button in the middle. While the Cancel and Power buttons are placed on the right.

The USB and Ethernet port is positioned at the right-hand side 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 the fuser is reached via a smaller cover on the top.

Once it hit the 20 -page marker on a black text test, the print speed also rise to 23.5ppm, but still a bit short of the claimed speed. 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. The colour business graphics are also well produced, having strong, solid colours and exceptional black text registration over colour. From what Samsung claims, the photo reproduction has an improved resolution of 9,600 x 600dpi, which results to a much better colour reproduction. There is fine detail in darker, shadowed areas, which you can't get in most lasers, plus a wider colour range compared to many of its competition.

There are two consumables to consider: the four drum and Samsung CLP-770ND toner cartridges, which is rated at 7,000 pages each (although the machine comes with 3,500-page starter cartridges) and a 50,000-page transfer belt. Adding up the costs of all these gives a black page cost of 2.13p and a colour cost of 7.33p. Both these figures are fairly decent, compared to the running cost of the £412 canon lbp7200cdn which comes out at 4.86p and 19.14p. Despite the fact that you can get low running 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 is a good, solid colour laser printer for use in busy environments, such as large workgroups or small departments, however there is not a lot to look forward to. It is not that fast or packed with the latest innovations. It lacks a USB port on the front panel, or password-protected, walk-up print capability.

Where it does achieve, though, is in the most important areas for any printer. It delivers top 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. Overall, you get your every penny's worth with this £570 colour heavyweight.