Last week I acquired a Samsung CLP-300 color laser printer. I bought it brand new, still in sealed box, for $99, local-pickup at the seller's house so no shipping charges. It was an eBay sale.

You can actually buy these printers cheaper than that at Amazon.com, but when you add in the $30 shipping charges, it would come to about $15 more than I paid.

The printer is adequate. It wouldn't be suitable for printing high quality photographs, but for the kind of printing I do it is acceptable. I've attached a photo that I printed with the printer, then scanned back in so it is a third generation picture (Camera-->Jpg-->Printer-->Scanner-->Resized-->Attached). Quality is adequate.

Samsung claims a 24,000 monthly duty cycle but the reviews I've seen suggest that might be hopelessly optimistic. Again, for my printing needs, irrelevant. A big month might be 200 pages for me.

It runs at 16ppm B&W, 4ppm color, and toner cost per page runs about 2.5 cents per page if your printing is text with color graphics, as opposed to full color prints which of course would run more. For total cost per page, add in another 3/4 cent per page for the drum kit (good for 15,000 pages) and you're looking at between 3 and 3.5 cents per page total. For a <$100 printer, that isn't too bad. If you want to scare yourself, tally up your cost per page on a typical low-end ink-jet printer!

Anybody have any first-hand experience with the CLP-300?

tanstaafl.