Samsung has taken its newly-designed colour laser engine, first seen in the CLP-300, and built it into this highly-compact all-in-one machine. The company has managed to incorporate a full A4 flatbed scanner onto the top of its laser engine, with very little increase in the overall dimensions of the combined unit.
The top surface of the CLX-2160N is the flatbed scanner lid and, in front of this, the lip of the device is rounded off with an inset control panel, offering a two-line by 16-character LCD display and a total of 11 control buttons.
Apart from large coloured ones to start and stop a copy job, there are two buttons dedicated to scanning an image to a memory drive plugged into a USB socket at the front, and to printing an image from the same source. There's also a feature called ID Copy, which scans two separate images and combines them on one sheet of paper, so you can produce an ID badge quickly and simply.
Below the control panel is a pull-down front panel, which reveals the four, coloured toner drums, each of which slots into the front of the machine, like fitting fuel rods into some science fiction power plant (if you're that way inclined). At the bottom of the front face of the printer is a rather conservative, 150-sheet paper tray, which projects forward by about 10cm and has a single-sheet feed built into its top cover.
At the back of the device are sockets for USB 2 and Ethernet connections, both of which come as standard. Samsung provides its mysteriously-named SmarThru control panel to handle the various functions of the CLX-2160N and there's ReadIris Pro 10 OCR software for scanning in text documents.
The main problem with the CLX-2160N is its print quality. While its plain black text is reasonable, if a little thicker than it should be, colour graphics are quite fuzzy and text over colour looks smeared. Trying to reproduce colour photos produces a cartoony effect with a limited range of hues.
The only consumables are the four drums of toner - 2,000 pages for black and 1,000 for each colour - and an imaging unit, which is good for 20,000 pages. Running through the maths produces a cost per page for black text of 2.77p and for colour just over 11p. Neither of these costs is particularly good and the colour cost is high compared with the device's immediate competitors.
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