I was in the market for a laser printer, and Samsung have a baby color printer that has a network option: The CLP-300N. Looking at the price of the mono laser printers that have the network option, the Samsung was only about $100 more. It also has drivers for Linux (CUPS) / Win / Mac OS X so I was sold

I tested it on Mac OS X and it was awesome. Great print quality. A bit slow to warm up, but it does work and it was cheap.

I tested it on Linux and got some different results. Printing color is pretty good. That goes for text and images. But black text…black text looks really bad. It doesn’t matter if I change the resolution from Draft / Normal / Best – the black text just bleeds. I took some photos and enlarged parts of them so that people can see.

The full photo

Block color / some black text

Color photos / color text

Color text / black text

Note that the blurriness is simply because of the way I took the photo. The text / photos are all quite sharp except for the black text. I guess if I’m printing pages with text that other people need to read I’m going to use the Mac to print it…either that, or use my Canon Inkjet (IP5200 that ONLY prints text because the LPD support for CUPS isn’t so hot).