Samsung CLP-300 - Color Laser For Everyone - Software Installation and Setup

Installation:

Installation of the CLP-300 is very simple under Windows 98SE and higher.  Thankfully, Windows Vista also includes support for this printer.  If you want to find out what Samsung Printers are supported under Vista, check out the full list over here.  To install the printer, we dropped in the driver CD, let the auto run feature go and where prompted to plug in the printer part way through.  In a matter of minutes everything was installed and working just fine without having to reboot.  In no time we were printing off color documents and pictures very easily and quietly with the CLP-300.

We've included some screenshots of the available driver settings below.

Driver - Layout

Driver - Paper

Driver - Graphics

The printer offers standard adjustments through the driver interface as it has no physical manual settings that can be changed as is the case with its big brother - the CLP-5x0 series.  All settings must be adjusted through software, as there is no LCD screen and menu buttons on the printer.  Software control works very well under Windows, but I wonder how much control a user running Linux has over the printer settings pictured above.  In some cases it would be nice to adjust things manually, although over 90% of users probably never manually adjust printer settings anyway.

If you feel that there isn't enough settings to tweak and play with, default installation of the CLP-300 will install a tray application that gives you more features to adjust.  This tray application also gives you the ability to monitor toner levels.  This is a nice bonus, although I'm not crazy about having another tray application starting when I turn on my computer.  According to the Task Manager, the software uses just under 8MB of system memory to give you these features.

With that being said, let's jump into testing.