By TAN KIT HOONG
intech@thestar.com.my
The budget OKI C310dn colour laser is fast, fairly quiet and produces very professional-looking printouts.
OKI is probably a brand name that is more well-known in business printer circles than in the consumer side of things, but this Japanese company has been around since 1881, starting out with telecommunications equipment.
These days of course, OKI has a fairly large business in office printing and has been making printers in one form or another since the 1970s.
This week we look at one of the company's budget business printers, the OKI C310dn colour laser printer.
OKI-dokey
Made for the SOHO environment, this printer has a single tray which supports up to A4 sizes and a multipurpose sheet feeder that can handle even very long banners.
The C310dn is fairly compact in size but not a lightweight by any means - it weighs in at a hefty 22kg, which is still light enough for a single person to carry, but heavy enough that it could throw out your back if you're not careful.
Installation is fairly straightforward - the software installation guides you through the steps and asks whether you want to connect directly via USB or over the network via the built-in Ethernet port.
Either way, it's done in about a minute or two.
From a cold start, the printer is ready to print in about a minute, and a warm start takes about half the time - that's pretty fast for a laser printer, especially when you consider it has to literally warm up to work properly.
EASY ACCESS: The top of the C310dn opens like a car hood, allowing for easy toner cartridge replacement.
What I did like is that the printer has a very large panel at the top which opens up for you to swap cartridges - the panel opens up much like the hood of a car and allows very easy access to the cyan, magenta, yellow and black toner cartridges.
By the way, since this is an office printer, the toner cartridges are very large and each colour cartridge is rated for up to 2,000 pages while the black toner cartridge is rated at 3,500 pages.
The menu system is fairly straightforward and should be familiar to most business printer users - there's a tiny LCD screen and four buttons and a directional pad.
OKI printing
We tested the C310dn by printing a number of photos and documents, both in colour and monochrome, and generally we were pleased with the results.
SIMPLE: The controls on the C310dn are simple and the tiny LCD screen displays all relevant information, including toner levels.
Colour documents printed at speeds very close to the claimed speed - in our tests we managed to print 20 pages a minute for documents with mixed text and colour images and about the same for monochrome documents.
The printer produced very crisp, clear text in documents - which is not surprising since this is a business printer after all.
As for photo printouts, the quality was about average - without a custom colour profile, out-of-the-box prints came out a little darker and warmer than I would have liked. A custom colour profile will fix this, but in any case, the C310dn is not positioned as a photo printer.
We also tried printing some banner-sized images with a supplied sheet of banner length paper, and we were quite pleased with the results; although there was a bit of visible banding in areas with plain colour.
Oh yes, the C310dn also supports duplex printing out of the box, which is really great - it greatly slows down printing speeds (to about 7.5ppm at best quality), but it's great that the printer supports this right out of the box.
Conclusion
Overall, you can't go far wrong with the OKI C310dn colour laser - it's fast, fairly quiet and produces very professional-looking printouts.
OKI has also put some thought into designing the printer so that it's pretty easy to replace the consumables and that's always a plus for any printer.
What's amazing is that at RM999, the value is quite unbeatable for the kind of speed and quality you're getting in a business-class printer of this level.
Pros: Fast; produces good quality prints; good value for money.
Cons: Heavy; average quality photo prints.
C310dn
(OKI)
Colour laser printer
PRINT RESOLUTION: 1,200 x 600dpi
PRINT SPEED: 22ppm (colour)/24ppm (monochrome)
INTERFACE: Hi-Speed USB 2.0/ 10/100 Ethernet
PAPER HANDLING: 250-sheet input tray/100-sheet multipurpose tray
PAPER SIZES: Up to A4, including long banners from multipurpose tray
DIMENSIONS (W x H x D): 24.2 x 41 x 50.4cm
WEIGHT: 22kg
PRICE: RM999
Review unit courtesy of OKI Printing Solutions, (03) 2287-1177.
RATING: 4 stars
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