It is not supposed to be smooth. It should have a rough, textured surface to better grab the paper.

tanstaafl.

What tanstaafl said. Some of the rollers will be smooth whilst others will have an odd rough texture on it for extra friction to pick up sheets. It shouldn't be cracked though. If its too smooth or damaged then you need to order a maintenance kit and replace the various pads and rollers.

Well, okay then. Good to know. We'll see whether cleaning it has lowered the jam rate or not.

Is there a bypass tray ? Maybe you could just just that and not bother with the paper cassette. It sounds like you print very little.

Not to pre-empt Dan, but no, that model does not have a bypass tray. It is a very simple, basic, inexpensive (Amazon has it on sale now for $139) color laser printer with absolutely no bells and whistles.

tanstaafl.

It is amazing that any kind of color laser printer is that cheap now. (do I sound old )

But a full set of (official) toner cartridges will cost you more than the purchase price on the printer. Thus, even color laser printers have finally come down to the same, awful level as inkjet printers.

Well, if you buy bottom-of-the-line color laser printers. There are plenty of reasonably quality color lasers out there that will last a long time. This one (and I have the same one, too) is not in that class.

There aren't any, as far as I know, high-end inkjet printers.

I'm not sure that's the correct conclusion. Laser printer toner cartridges haven't increased in price on average, it's just that now you have to buy four of them for color laser printing. Just look at those HP Photosmart printers. Those have something like 6 ink cartridges, so you're going to spend way more than you would for a black and white ink printer. Color is more expensive with either technology.

So it's the same it's always been, except now we have affordable ways to print in color with a laser printer.

Lastly, if you only want to print in black and white, you can actually print very cheaply with some ink models. Take this one, for example.

Yeah, I meant to exclude large-format printers. Is it even possible to print onto Letter/A4 sized paper on those? The last one I had access to had its paper on a big roll.

One penny a page for ink. Not bad.

But about two minutes shopping showed me where I can print black and white on the Samsung color laser printer for half that amount. Now that is with aftermarket toner, no guarantees, no promises that it won't gum up the printer, but so far I have been OK with aftermarket suppliers.

tanstaafl.

This one will do cut sheet letter size

Yeah, I'm fine with no-name toner cartridges for my aging laserjet. I HATED it in the offices I worked in, though. They simply couldn't perform like the name brand, and caused all sorts of problems.

I'd expect that the cartridges included with the printer are maybe 3/4 empty.

"You're going to need a bigger boat"

Stop exaggerating, gbeer. Averyone knows that they're only 2/3 empty!

tanstaafl.

Update:

The third-party toner seemed to work fine, but the printer itself is decidedly not fine. It gives the red light, like it's jammed or something. There is clearly no paper anywhere around, so no jam to fix. Power cycling or whatever just causes the same behavior. One of the motors tries to turn for about a second, then *clunk* and it's got the red light back on again.

Is it dead, Jim?

EDIT: So I found the service manual from some dodgy Russian web site. The service manual helpfully mentions there are menus that might tell you service related things, e.g., "Menu-Setup - Maintenance - Check other - (Select a desired part)". Unfortunately, there's no such menu available anywhere from the web interface of the printer. All I know is "Stop Printing, Service Requested". I'll also note, for the record, that I've found at least one other bloke with the same exact problem.

Was it this manual? If it isn't, for $3.24 you're not taking too big a risk. I haven't bought the manual myself, but I keep the bookmark handy just in case.

Try opening up the printer and taking it apart a little bit. The fuser comes out with just four screws. Pay attention to the drive axle for the fuser -- it connects with a spring-loaded coupler that slides to one side to disengage. Put it back together and see if that cleared any jam codes or anything. Alternatively for $139 you can just replace the whole printer and keep the old one for spare parts. Probably make more sense in the long run, although if you are printing more than about 50 pages a week you might (IMHO) be better off to buy a more expensive (i.e., heavy duty) printer and be done with it. Of course now that you've invested $25--$30 in aftermarket toner, and God knows how much of your time trying to get the existing printer to work, it would be a shame to give up on it now.

tanstaafl.

I just wanted to give a little update on my own printer. I dropped $25 on a refurb toner cartridge, and now I'm back to full operation. This printer (and cartridge) has lasted at least 3 years, and now we'll see how this refurb toner works. Fortunately, I don't really care if it starts giving me problems, as I never even expected it to last this long

To sum up, I'd definitely recommend Samsung laser printers without hesitation. If this one ever died, I'd replace it with that color model you linked to, Doug. No question.

In the end, I decided that I don't want to throw any more effort at this damn thing, so I decided to spend a remarkably modest $230 (plus shipping) on the step-up Samsung CLP-620ND (21ppm color or black&white, duplex handling built-in). Street price seems to typically be twice that, but Amazon fronts for a variety of no-name resellers, including one called "eSeller" who seems to have positive reviews.

I figure, no matter the extent to which this vendor screws me, I'm really dealing with Amazon, so if it shows up DOA or something and the vendor gives me grief, I'll still have some measure of recourse.

Did you look into your cost per page for this printer? Buy your genuine Samsung toner from Amazon, you'll be paying nearly 13 cents per page for toner. Best price I found (cursory search on eBay, you may be able to do better) comes out at six cents a page. That's not horrific, but it's still more than twice the cost per page of your CLP-315.

Print 200 pages a week, and your best toner cost comes out at $624 per year. Looks like NewEgg would cost you $1040. Amazon's toner will set you back $1352. These prices do not include shipping. Makes that $230 initial cost look a little less inviting.

tanstaafl.

I find that basing quality judgments on the (nominal) manufacturer is fraught with problems.

It used to be that when you did that, the company was using one design team and one manufacturing facility, but that's no longer the case. Samsung (or HP or whoever) might have multiple printer departments that run in almost complete isolation from each other.

Of course, that assumes that they're doing the design themselves at all. They might have decided to farm out design of the cheap printer to some fly-by-night engineering company in a third world country somewhere.

Even if it is the same design unit, they might farm out one to the lowest bidding factory and make another in-house.

Of course, all of this assumes that it's even really their product at all, and not just some Chinese domestic-market piece of crap that they decided made more sense to rebadge than bother developing one of their own.

Anyway, I've gotten burned on this a few times in the recent past, and I'm not going to make that mistake again.

So far as I can tell, the magic with cheap toner is that it takes the cloners a while to break the security on any given printer so they can ship compatible cartridges. My gamble with the new Samsung is that, by the time I burn through the estimated 2000 pages of life it has in the initial cartridges (notably, this printer doesn't have "starter" toner that's 3/4 empty), there should be third-party discount toner available.

We'll see on that.

Also, with respect to Bitt's concern of getting cheap crap -- my totally unsubstantiated guess is that by purchasing the next model up, which is rated as more of a workgroup printer than a cheapo entry model, perhaps it will be vaguely more built to last.

We'll see on that as well.

Right. They're only half empty. The replacement cartridges are rated at 4,000 pages.

tanstaafl.

Oddly, Samsung offers 2K and 4K cartridges, with the latter costing notably more than the former. Presumably, once the toner cloners come online, they'll sell only the latter with prices lower than the former.

Ah! I hadn't seen the 2K toners. Do the 4K toners cost more than twice as much as the 2K toners?

My CLP-300 is still working flawlessly after 4300 pages, but who knows how much longer it will go? I will be very interested in how the 620D works out for you as I have {just!) enough room for it in my computer hutch.

tanstaafl.

At NewEgg, the prices are a bit odd. They seem to have two prices for the "full" cartridges, which are otherwise the same. Anyway, going with their cheaper prices, you pay maybe $80 for the "half" version and $100 for the "full" version (for black toner -- colors cost more).

The toner cartridges for my Lexmark also come in "two prices". The lower price is for the "cartridge exchange program", where one promises to mail back the old cartridge. The higher price is without the exchange.

Just like many auto parts.