If you always wanted a color laser but didn't think you could justify the cost, now would be a good time to reconsider. Priced at just $200 (street), the Samsung CLP-315 takes color laser printing to a new level of affordability. (The same printer is available with Wi-Fi, as the CLP-315W, for $250.) The CLP-315 offers a lot of printer for the price, with reasonably good output quality in general and great-looking graphics in particular—all enough reason to award it our Editors' Choice.

In case you're familiar with the Samsung CLP-300N, which the CLP-315 replaces, I should say right up front that despite the similarity in name, the two printers have almost nothing in common. The CLP-300N was a bit of a disappointment. The CLP-315 is a very different—and far better—printer.

Samsung boasts that the CLP-315 is one of the world's smallest color lasers. At 9.6 by 15.3 by 12.3 inches (HWD), it's certainly the smallest I've tested and the lightest by far, at just 24.3 pounds. In fact, it's one of only two color lasers I've seen that are small enough to qualify as truly personal—the other being the HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni, which has a larger footprint and costs about twice as much. Both printers, though, fit easily on a desktop without dominating it and are short enough not to make you feel that they are towering over you.

The CLP-315 also shares at least one limitation with the HP printer: To keep the height down, the paper drawer is limited to 150 sheets. If you print more than about 30 pages per day, on average, refilling the drawer may turn into an annoying chore. This shouldn't be a problem in most cases, given that the CLP-315 is meant as a personal printer that connects by USB cable only. It's more likely to be an issue if you share the printer over a network.

Setting up the CLP-315 is as easy as it gets. The toner cartridges ship in place inside the printer, without needing any preparation before you can use them. All you need do is remove some tape from the outside of the printer, load paper, plug in a USB cable, and run the automated installation routine from disc. I tested using Windows XP, but according to Samsung the printer also comes with drivers for Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Vista, Vista x64, Linux, and Mac OS 10.3 through 10.5. A driver for XP x64 is also available on Samsung's Web site.

How you feel about the CLP-315's speed depends on what you're judging it against. One of the ways Samsung kept the cost down was by using one laser and four-pass printing—meaning that the paper needs four passes for color pages, with one pass for each toner color.

The design gives the engine a rating of 17 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome but only 4 ppm for color. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), it took a total of 24 minutes 30 seconds. Although relatively slow for a laser, that's only a little slower than the far more expensive CP1518ni, at 21:41. Other color lasers in the CP1518ni's price range are faster but too big to count as truly personal. The Brother HL-4040CN's total time, for example, was just 10:27, but the printer is a behemoth that weighs 73.7 pounds.

It's also worth comparing speed between the CLP-315 and inkjets. There are actually a few inkjets that are faster—notably the HP Officejet Pro L7680 All-In-One, which took just 15:35 on the laser version of our business applications suite. But the L7680 costs more, too (about $200 more). The more important point is that the CLP-315 is much faster than the vast majority of inkjets, so if you're graduating to it from an inkjet, it won't feel slow.

Text and graphics output quality is also better than what you'd get from inkjets. Text quality is a touch below par for a laser but still good enough for most business output. More than half the fonts in our test suite qualified as both easily readable and well formed at 6 points, and only one highly stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points to pass both tests. Unless you have an unusual need for small fonts, the CLP-315 can handle any standard business document.

Graphics output is better than most color lasers offer, with vibrant colors and smooth fills. I saw some minor flaws, including visible dithering in the form of mild patterns, but the overall quality is suitable for anything up to and including marketing materials like handouts and trifold brochures. However, one of our test images—with heavy coverage on the entire printable area of the page—made the paper curl. Given that the problem didn't show up with any other file, however, you're not likely to see this in real-world use.

Photo quality is near the high end of the typical range for a color laser—a touch short of true photo quality but suitable for things like client newsletters or marketing materials. The only serious problem I saw was in monochrome photos, where the color balance was a little off, and the output showed different color tints at different shades of gray.

Note that Samsung isn't making up for the low initial price of the CLP-315 by charging a lot for toner. The claimed cost per page—at 3 cents for monochrome and 15 cents for color—is about the same as for most color lasers that cost twice as much or even more.

Underlying every point—both good and bad—about the CLP-315 is its price, an issue that makes positives like small size and high-quality graphics that much more significant, and negatives like the fact it's not the fastest that much less important. Even if it were more expensive, the CLP-315 would be well worth considering. It's impressive enough to earn an Editors' Choice.

Check out the Samsung CLP-315's test scores.

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