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Samsung claims 16ppm for black pages from this device and 4ppm for colour. Our five-page text print completed in 31 seconds, giving a real black print speed of 9.68ppm, but this increased to 13.6ppm when we printed our 20 page document, a good result. A five-page colour text and graphics print gave a speed of 3.37ppm, which is also close enough to the claim to be applauded.

Print quality from the CLX-3175FW varies from document to document. Black text is generally well reproduced, but colour graphics are overly bright. This may be OK for block colours and even for some publicity-related photographs, but there’s also a registration problem, with obvious haloes around black characters printed over coloured backgrounds. Photographic prints look much too bright and there’s no way of damping down the vividness through the printer driver.

Black text copies looked thin and blocks of colour became patchy, though this can be partially compensated for by adjusting the darkness of the copy.

As well as the toner cartridges, good for 1,000 pages in colour and 1,500 in black, you’ll need to buy an imaging unit every 6,000 colour pages and a waste toner bottle every 10,000. Add all these lot up and you get a black page print figure of 3.45p and a colour one of 13.6p, including 0.7p for paper, in each case. Both these figures are high, with the colour print cost well above most non-Samsung laser MFPs.

It's also disappointing to discover the printer comes with ‘starter’ cartridges, containing 1,000 pages of black and 700 of each colour, a third lower than the standard parts. When you’re paying the best part of £400 for a printer, it’s reasonable to expect fully-filled consumables.

Verdict

This is a small and well-featured multi-function printer, one of the few offering wireless connectivity as standard. There are some rough edges though, like the poor setup documentation, only partly functional walk-up USB socket and partly filled toner cartridges. Colour print is also over-saturated; leaving you wondering if 'smallest on the planet' is the key function of this multifunction printer.

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