With a home audience in mind, Samsung has given the Samsung CLP-315 printer a striking polished black exterior, and delicate curves that make this far and away the best-looking laser printer we've seen.

And the Samsung CLP-315 remains substantial in all of the important areas. The 150-sheet input tray, for example, has a robust feel to it, and keeps pages crisp and flat.

Brother has been leading the way when it comes to making it easy to replace consumables, but Samsung isn't far behind, and the front-mounted cartridges make it a cinch to refuel the CLP-315 without having to poke around the back.

The Samsung CLP-315 is intended to be operated from a single PC but, for home offices with multiple computers, a CLP-315W version is planned that offers wireless capabilities.

As a working printer, though, the Samsung CLP-315 isn't as impressive. In the highest quality mode, our 10-page test document turned out pages at the rate of 12.8 pages per minute - not too far from the stated speed of 17ppm.

However, almost a third of this time was spent waiting for the print job to start up. Should you be looking to use the Samsung CLP-315 for small jobs of two or three pages, you can expect real world speeds to dip noticeably. The resulting text is reasonably dark and clear, with only the faintest hint of fuzziness surrounding the characters under very close scutiny.

Colour graphics images can be generated at a rate of 2.6 to 3.1 pages per minute, making this a fairly slow laser printer for colour. Images are also slightly too dark, with the blacks, dark blues and greys slightly too gloomy. Results are still quite eye-catching, but the Samsung CLP-315 is a laser printer better suited to black text than to colour images.

Small size often means a large price, but the opposite is the case with the Samsung CLP-315 — we think $269 for a colour laser is a remarkable deal. The running costs aren't the lowest you'll find, but neither are they prohibitive compared to those of, for example, the kind of inkjet that you might choose instead of this laser.

Nor, indeed, are they really more expensive than those of other sub-$270 colour lasers, such as the HP LaserJet CP1215. However, should you primarily be wanting a text churner, you'll still find a mono laser working out as a much cheaper printer to run.

Samsung has given the Samsung CLP-315 printer a striking polished black exterior, and delicate curves that make this far and away the best-looking laser printer we've seen.