Samsung Electronics CLP-680ND Color Printer

Product Description

Samsung's new CLP-680ND color laser printer provides the ultimate value for businesses looking to make an impact with their prints while keeping their bottom line in the black.

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Product Details

• Color: Brown, White
• Brand: Samsung
• Model: CLP-680ND
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 12.30" h x 16.50" w x 17.80" l, 44.40 pounds
• Memory: 256MB
• Networking: Gigabit Ethernet
• Native resolution: 9600 x 600

Features

• 25/25 ppm with 533 MHz dual cpu, 256 MB standard memory, gigabit Ethernet and duplex for fast, reliable and economical performance
• Brilliant color quality with Polymerized Toner, new and improved rendering engine, and up to 9,600 x 600 dpi print resolution
• High yield all in one toner cartridges for a low CPP and TCO

Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
A Review for ARTISTS
By A very happy artist
If you are just in the market for a machine that prints in duplex, is networked, does X number of pages per minute, you have dozens of choices -- you can read through the other reviews for their comments.

But if you are a creative soul, the kind who wants to print on metallic paper, or decal, or make t-shirts and transfers and all kinds of other things that make most other printers keel over and die, this is the machine for you.

Back in the day, the old monster copy machines used fuser oil, which kept the fancy papers from sticking to the hot fuser as it heat-pressed the toner into place. When smaller machines came about, the manufacturers got rid of the fuser oil and ran the machines hotter -- a short hot fuse vs. a longer, cooler one. All those specialty papers that were developed for the old machines would just melt onto the fuser roller. And soon those companies started making their larger machines the same way.

Most artists I know solved this problem by finding a dirt old copy machine that they nursed back to health every time it broke down. But consumables are scarce, and the old machines are getting harder to find and maintain. Manufacturers of specialty papers developed workarounds with inkjet products, but they just aren't as good. Up until now, the ONLY alternative I had found was an adapted OKI Data machine in the seven thousand dollar range. The Samsung CLP-680ND is a godsend.

Here's why it works:
The 680ND (only the ND, btw) has a very low fusing temperature. I am told that the fuser temp. is between 55-86 degrees F, although the manual says it's around 325 degrees for 0.1 second when it fuses. (I called Samsung twice before purchasing -- both times was told that the lower number IS the fusing temperature on this model, even though it is listed as the "operating temperature" in the manual. They said the manual covers other models in this line. I'm not entirely convinced that they understood my question, or why I was asking, but even in the 325 range it runs very cool. I think most home printers are in the 385+ range.)

The reason why it runs cooler is because it uses polymerized toners. Picture toner particles encased in wax. It doesn't need to be as hot, the colors are very vivid, and it actually gives it more of a glossy look than regular toner. Again, this is ONLY the ND model.

So far I have tried a variety of papers and labels and decals, including taping smaller pieces of specialty papers to regular printer paper to see how they fared. I'm very impressed at what it can handle, and the colors are spot on. When you read the specs, you can tell they really did design this model with artists in mind. They did it right. I don't normally write reviews, but I want them to sell so many of these machines that they never discontinue the consumables, so I can keep creating for a long, long time.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Good quality work horse
By Tetsu Noguchi
I have had the distinct pleasure of watching the industry change with hands on experience through the decades. Back in my advertising days, I remember spending millions of yen (tens of thousands of dollars) on the latest and greatest super high tech Canon color laser printer, with a separate tower computer sized postscript rasterizer and a mind-blowing 128MBs of RAM.

Since then, I've owned lots and lots of HP printers, a few Brothers and Canons here and there, and a smattering of Epsons.

Most recently, about a year or two ago, somewhere in there, I was at Fry's on the hunt for a new printer because the full duplex HP2200 network printer I had was falling apart and jamming constantly, even after doing the full roller upgrade.

Until this latest breakdown, I never considered it a big deal to spend $2K+ on a rock solid printer, but while I knew inkjet would be unacceptable for my uses, I deeply loathed the idea of spending that much on a printer again.

Walking around, I was surprised to see this printer from Samsung, having never known that Samsung made printers.

Generally, if you include:
- Full Duplex Printing
- 4 color laser
- High resolution
- fast B&W printing

all in a single laser printer, the mechanisms are not designed to be able to last very long. A printer with these features under $1K? I'd have guessed maybe a year tops at a thousand pages a month.

But the design of this unit is uniquely geared towards longevity, parts that are well integrated to mitigate failure points and jamming. After reading about it online, specifically the unique stacked vertical drum mechanism designed for easy toner replacement and as a method to minimize page curling during the duplexing pull back, I figured at $399 (now $299 on Amazon), it was worth giving it a try.

Perhaps my expectations were low, but this printer has amazed me month after month. These days, my four big print job types are: contracts, proposal presentations, sow's and project outlines, and rfp's. For these types of projects, I need fast black and white printing, or do lots of collated color printing. Some months as little as 100 pages. on rare months as much as 3K pages.

In the photo, you can see the front door. This is an ingenious design as the side that is facing you is a pull down door, much like a kitchen oven would be. And the toner cartridges are essentially stacked, so it's easy to select the one you want to replace, pull it out and pop in a new one. There are paper tray extensions you can get, but this isn't strictly necessary.

The software driver, of course, includes options for how you want to print, and automatically calculates where to adjust the margin for two page printing, depending on how you want to bind the pages and where you want the matching margins to be. The toner measuring dialogue box is separate and be accessed any time.

The printer is also easy to set if you want to manually configure anything, because of the display and navigation buttons. You can assign a static IP if you like.

Some of the tech features are missing. It doesn't support AirPrint, it doesn't have a WiFi client built-in, the configuration controls are somewhat limited. But overall, what it needs, it has, and it works consistently well.

The shocker for this printer is that it works as advertised. After well over 15K pages, and a toner replacement or two, this printer has proved to be what I wish every printer I ever owned was. It has all the features you'd want in a printer. It prints fast in B&W, the resolution is very good, color prints are not as good as photo printers but much better than color laser prints from high end printer systems just 10 years ago, it never jams....and I mean NEVER jams, the toner is stupid easy (and clean) to replace, network printing is a breeze (from Windows and OSX), with tablet printing through print sharing, and most impressive....every other printer I ever owned or used started having little issues here or there, that over months or years, started showing up in parts breaking down and causing all kinds of printer frustrations and delays, but this work horse just keeps on working. After more than a year, I can honestly, surprisingly, accurately state that there has been zero jams....not a typo....zero jams.

In fact, what inspired me to type this review is that I'm about two thirds through printing out 1500 pages worth of RFPs, printing in sections, double-sided, full color. Though I print in sections to make sure I can put dividers between sections, I have yet to have a single error. printing this much a decade ago would have been a 10-12 hour project easy. With the Samsung CLP-620ND, it's been a little over 2 hours and I'm more than halfway done. Unbelievable.

Just last month, I had to print 7 copies of a 95 page document, totaling 665 pages. That project was B&W. Not a single jam, on paper that was a little too thin for this printer, full duplex. A perfect storm for jams. Yet not a single jam.

Often, I have a lot of little niggly complaints about products I own and review. But this printer is one of the few that does everything I need it to do, has nothing that I don't need, and...well...just works.

Do I have any complaints? Well...it's not an MFC, and for most small businesses or consumers, that's a deal breaker. But MFCs often have a variety of issues because of their sheer mechanical complexity.

For the money (and if you can afford the space), it's very hard to argue with the quality and reliability you get with this printer at a cost that is a fraction of what was common pricing just a few years ago. $299? Really? $299? For a printer this rock solid?

What more can you ask from a printer?

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful prints, Windows/Mac differences though
By S.E. Poza
This printer is clearly designed for the office market or for a user who needs a solid color printer for business. Because of that, it is large, heavy, and the consumables are comparatively expensive when you look at a consumer-level inkjet. It includes postscript printing capability so you can print EPS files cleanly, though I believe it is interpolating and not true postscript since it seems to take longer to print postscript files. For business, especially if you need to do charts and graphs or print razor sharp text, this does a great job. I tested it out on several charts and graphs and they were all exceptionally sharp and showed fine detail in pie charts with textured wedges. The output is beautiful, crisp, bright and detailed. Photos that I printed showed fine detail on small images of faces and good color range. I printed a variety of photographs which included both close-up and distance shots of faces. Even the far away shots showed good detail on small faces. The sort of posterizing or loss of fine detail that you sometimes see in cheaper printers was not an issue. Still, this is not for creating professional prints for sale, but it does very nicely for general business and home use as well as proofing of art.

Prepping the printer is relatively easy. There are numbered picture-based instructions (no manual except one included on the CD) which walk you through how to remove the various tabs and protective bits of tape and how to prepare the toner cartridges. The toner drawer feels a little flimsy, but the printer already weighs 51 lbs. so I'm not sure added weight for a sturdier case would be worthwhile. It's not as if one needs to be opening and closing it frequently, but caution when handling it may be warranted. If you catch it on something, it will likely chip, crack, or snap.

In regards to installation, I used this printer with two different versions of the Windows OS (XP and 7) and with Mac OS 10.5.8. On Windows XP and 7, it is a dream to install and use. You install the drivers from the included CD and it's pretty much good to go with wireless printing right away. A print manager is also installed so that you can change preferences or track toner use/replacement. Samsung clearly did a good job prepping this for Windows.

On the Mac side, things did not go so smoothly and that's why I knocked a star off of the rating. While I could use this with my Mac, I could only do so using a USB cable. I could not get the wireless connection to work no matter what I did. I should note that this may be my version of the Mac OS (10.5.8 is an older version) and that I have the same problem with a Canon inkjet wireless all-in-one that I sometimes use and had a similar problem with an HP all-in-one that I temporarily used. I can print, but only when hard-wired with a USB cable, and it's also important to note that this Samsung printer does not come with said cable in the box. This is somewhat annoying since, even if you can get the wireless to work on your Mac, you are required as part of the installation to temporarily connect via USB (this is not the case on Windows). If you've got a Mac, you might want to make sure you have one on hand or purchase one concurrent with the printer.

The cartridges will print between 1500-2000 pages depending on the amount of color/text used for the pages. While the replacement cartridges from Samsung are expensive, you can get lower priced ones from a third party for as little as $80, though I imagine using them may violate the warranty. While even $80 per toner cartridge seems pricey, you can replace them selectively (there are separate cyan, magenta, yellow, and black cartridges). If you're considering a laser printer like this which is expensive or an inkjet which is cheap, it's important to consider how often you print. An inkjet's cartridges will dry out if not used regularly and will not print nearly as many pages as a toner cartridge. My rough calculation is that this will cost you 5 cents per page and that compares well to color inkjets which will cost between 3 and 9 cents per page depending on your printer (Kodak models are about 3 cents, some Canon and HP models are 9 cents). Of course, this hardware costs 3-4 times that of an inkjet, but the quality is at least that order of magnitude better. It really depends on your priorities and how great your need for a higher quality output.

The paper feed on this is very smooth and I printed only on standard photocopy paper with excellent results. It has an adjustable feed tray, but I only tested it with letter-size prints. The manual does say that it supports a wide variety of paper sizes and weights though.

All in all, this is a very nice printer with lovely output at a price point which is competitive, but not the lowest price. It's hard to directly compare as there are cheaper, smaller models which are all-in-one but are not designed to be such workhorses. Cheaper color laser printers tend to be slower, for instance. Depending on your needs, this may be a very good option, particularly if you are a Windows user.

See all 31 customer reviews...