After Samsung earned an Editors' Choice for its $200 CLP-315 color laser printer, I couldn't wait to get my hands on the CLX-3175FN, a color laser all-in-one (AIO) with its own impressively low price ($400 street) and a surprisingly full set of features. The combination makes the printer an enticing possibility as a personal or small-office AIO.

The CLX-3175FN prints, scans, and faxes, even over a network; it works as a standalone fax machine, copier, and e-mail sender; and its 15-page automatic document feeder (ADF) makes it easy to scan, copy, or fax multipage documents as well as legal-size pages.

A USB connector on the front of the printer lets you scan to and print directly from USB keys, as well as print directly from PictBridge cameras. Samsung doesn't tout the PictBridge feature, however, since this isn't a photo printer. In fact, Samsung doesn't even put a PictBridge logo near the connector. Nevertheless, printing from a camera can be a useful feature in some small offices—in businesses that deal with real estate, for example—as well a welcome extra in a home office, where you might want to print an occasional photo to reside under a refrigerator magnet.

In addition to its standalone e-mail feature, the CLX-3175FN also lets you give a command to the printer from your PC to scan a document, then lets you launch an e-mail message on your PC with the scanned document attached. Oddly, there's no way to do the same thing from the printer's front panel. Instead, you have to scan to your computer's hard drive, then walk back to your PC to manually create the e-mail message at your PC, and add the attachment. It's an extra step that you shouldn't have to take—you should be able to do everything from the printer's panel.

Virtually all color laser AIOs are too big and heavy to qualify as truly personal. The CLX-3175FN is the exception. At 13.5 by 16.3 by 14.7 inches (HWD), it takes up less space on a desktop than many inkjets, and at 33.5 pounds, it's light enough for one person to move around. Setting it up couldn't be easier. The toner cartridges ship in place inside the printer, and you don't even need to prepare them in any way. Simply find a spot for the printer, remove the shipping tape, load paper, plug in the power cord and cable, and run the automated installation routine from disc.

I connected over a network and installed the software on a Windows XP system. According to Samsung, the printer also comes with a full set of drivers and software for Windows 2000, Vista, XP x64, Vista x64, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 x64. In addition, it comes with printer and scanner drivers, but no fax driver, for Mac OS 10.3 through 10.5, and a printer driver for Linux is available on Samsung's Web site.

When I reviewed the Samsung CLP-315, I suggested that how you feel about the print speed depends on what you're comparing it with. Given that the CLX-3175FN uses the same engine, rated at 17 pages per minute for monochrome and 4 ppm for color, it's not surprising that the same comment applies here, too. If you're used to color laser speeds, the CLX-3175FN may feel slow, but if you're moving up to it from an inkjets, it's likely to be a lot faster than what you're used to.

On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), I timed the CLX-3175FN at a total of 24 minutes 37 seconds. That's a bit slower overall than the 20:47 total for the Editors' Choice HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi, but the comparison is less straightforward than in most cases, because the HP printer engine is slower than that of the CLX-3175FN for monochrome (at 12 ppm compared with the CLX-3175FN's 17ppm) but faster for color (at 8 ppm, compared with 4ppm).

On our tests, the CLX-3175FN was actually faster than, or essentially tied with, the HP printer on 10 of the 13 tests in the suite. Most of the CM1312nfi's speed advantage came from just one test—a 50-page Microsoft Word file with color text on each page. As a practical matter in real-world use, the two printers are closely matched for speed overall. The two are also closely matched for photos, with the CLX-3175FN averaging 32 seconds for 4-by-6s and 40 seconds for 8-by-10s, compared with 33 and 35 seconds, respectively, for the CM1312nfi.

The CLX-3175FN scored reasonably well on output quality, although text quality is a bit below par for a laser. More than half of the fonts on our text tests qualified as both easily readable and well formed at 6 points, and most of those passed both thresholds at 5 points. One highly stylized font with thick strokes needed 20 points to pass both tests, but that's not unusual. You wouldn't want to use the CLX-3175FN for demanding desktop-publishing applications or legal documents with lots of small type, but it can handle anything short of that.

Graphics output is better overall than for most color lasers, with fully saturated color and solid fills. Most people would consider the quality good enough for marketing materials like one-page handouts and trifold brochures. I saw some minor misregistration, with thin gaps of white between blocks of colors in some cases. Whether you consider this a serious issue depends on how much of a perfectionist you are. The printer also tends to add a curl to pages with heavy coverage and little-to-no margin, but unless you print a lot of full-page graphics on a regular basis, you might not even notice the curl.

Color photos were a touch short of true photo quality, but good enough for client newsletters, marketing material, and the like. Black-and-white photos, however, suffered from a color balance issue, with different color tints at different shades of gray. Depending on your tastes, you may or may not consider the monochrome photo output acceptable for newsletters and the like.

As a point of comparison, the HP Color LaserJet CM1312nfi closely matches the CLX-3175FN on graphics quality and outdoes it for text and photos, all of which leaves the HP printer securely in place as Editors' Choice. That said, if you need a low-cost color laser AIO for a small or home office, or for personal use in any size office, the Samsung CLX-3175FN offers a highly attractive balance of small size, speed, and output quality at a somewhat lower price than its closest competition.

Benchmark Test Results
Check out the Samsung CLX-3175FN's test scores.