Samsung CLP-770ND Color Laser Printer

The Samsung CLP-770ND is a color laser printer aimed at SMBs that has great print speeds. Overall print quality was excellent, though colors were more muted than I'd like to see in a printer this expensive; and for the price, some options such as wireless would've been nice.

The Samsung CLP-770ND is a high-end color laser printer aimed at small and medium businesses. That means it's built for heavy-duty performance, to work across a network, and with a long duty cycle. It also means it's big, heavy, and p

Samsung boasts that this printer warms up fast, with first-page-out times of about 10 seconds. That's a strong claim, but one that was completely backed up in my tests, where the first page of even large PDF files took only 11 seconds to come out. For smaller files, such Word and Excel files with graphics, first-page-out times were as low as eight seconds. And once that first page is out, things get even faster. For example, a four-page PDF took a total of 16 seconds to print--11 of those were for the first page. Using the convenient built-in duplexer didn't slow things down too much either, adding only about 10 seconds for the four-page PDF print time.

The printer uses four toner cartridges (black, yellow, magenta, cyan) which Samsung says will last for 7,000 pages of printing), so while the consumable cost may be high, you won't need to change cartridges often unless you do an awful lot of printing. The transfer belt, which is a rotating belt that helps the separate ink colors to be applied properly, is rated for up to 50,000 images.

The prints look excellent, as they should with a laser printer. Fonts at any size were sharp and clear and looked great on laser-printer paper in particular. Colors were good but not spectacular; they were muted and a bit darker than the original graphics, and no amount of fooling around with the color options could improve them. On a related note, there's very little documentation to help you along that path; the User Guide barely touched on color settings. Since this machine is aimed at businesses that need to print color graphics, that was a disappointment.

Business class color laser printers tend to be large, and this one is no exception, with a weight of over 60 pounds, so be prepared to have a friend help you pick it up. And while this printer is networkable, you'll have to pay even more for a version that can be wirelessly networked; given the price tag on this unit, I'd say that should've been a standard feature.

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.