The world is a changing...

If you had asked me a few years ago about buying a colour laser printer for home I would have laughed. They were expensive, large and obtrusively noisy. Well like most things in the PC industry it seems times have changed. With the new generation of colour laser printers hitting the market for less than £200 and in a size you can sit on your desk, its now quite a sensible proposition to have one at home.

So what is out there?

Hunting through websites and even in PC World gives an overwhelming amount of choice, don't let that scare you off though; drawing up a quick lists shows theres quite a bit of variation between the products and narrowing it down isn't as hard as at first it seems.

Here are they key factors to look out for:

DPI - This basically specifies how fine the printer can print. When you send text or images to a laser printer it converts them into tiny little dots which it then prints to the paper. In most laser printers this is usually fixed at about 600 dots for every inch otherwise known as DPI. On more advanced printers however they often have an option to increase this. If you plan to print just plain text then 600DPI is quite adequate but sometimes you might wish to have that extra bit of detail for the odd photograph or chart; if you do check out the resolutions specified in this column.

Sheets - This specifies the amount of paper you can put in the paper tray. Personally I find nothing more irritating than constantly having to fill up a printer with paper so the more sheets the printer holds the better.

LAN - More and more often these days people run ADSL or Cable routers at home and quite often have more than one computer. If this sounds like you then its most likely that a LAN based printer will be more convenient than a USB one. Having your printer on the network means you can print to it from any computer at any time without worrying about if the other machines are switched on or not.

PPM - The is the amount of pages per minute the printer can print. These values are not always representative of the real world but can be used as a good guide. The first number is monochrome speed and the second number is for colour prints. Printers with wildly different values are known as multi-pass printers, they pass the paper through the printer once for each colour printed which is why colour takes much longer. The printers with the same number or similar numbers are single pass printers. Generally a single pass printer is a better choice unless you plan to print in colour very infrequently.

Cost - This is a rough guide price for the printer not including VAT. I have based it on prices from a couple of popular sites (in the UK) I use. You may get different results so please check before making any decisions.

Some Notes...

Among my travels I noticed a few points which are difficult to illustrate in the table above but may be relevant to you:

Samsung usually has the best driver support including Linux and Windows x64 variants.

Xerox and OKI usually have the cheapest consumables.

Konica Minolta and TallyGenicom often have the most expensive consumables.

HP large capacity consumables last considerably longer than anyone elses.

Samsung make the only printer with more than 600dpi in both directions and the only printer with duplexing (double sided printing) below 200 pounds.

Narrowing it down

Obviously everyones requirements differ but for me a tray with anything less than 250 sheets is a little to low so I instantly crossed those options from my list. Also a printer without LAN is a pain - so I dropped those as well. I didn't fancy a multi-pass either so I crossed those off. This basically left me with the HP 2600n and the OKI C3300n.

Now normally the temptation is to just buy a the HP as they are a well known established brand but just recently I've had some pretty bad experiences with some of their drivers and as you can see from the specifications the HP really doesn't compete too well. Not only is the HP 2600 physically bigger than the OKI, but the consumables cost twice as much and it is half the print speed.

Therefore I chose the OKI...

The OKI 3300n

I didn't intend for this to be a review blog but since I bought the printer I may as well let you know what I think of it.

Install:

The install would literally have taken me less than a minute if OKI had printed the default web admin password in the manual. As it turns out it took me a while longer to hunt it down but installation was still a very short time.

Interface:

The main interface into the printer is via its self generated web page. Its a very comprehensive tool providing all the information you need from the status of your consumables to what paper sizes are available. It does have one little oddity though (albeit not a very serious one) in that the web interface goes offline whilst the printer is printing. A resources issue no doubt?

Speed:

What can I say but it's very fast. In fact its faster than many of my customers floor standing Colour HP LaserJets (but unsurprisingly its not as fast as the floor standing mono ones).

Print quality:

As far as text goes you would need a magnifying glass to fault it but then this is a laser printer after all so I wouldn't expect anything less. For photos its not so simple...

Comparing it to my HP inkjet on plain paper; the darks are considerably deeper and crisper on the laser but the lights are brighter and clearer on the inkjet. I have a feeling I could tweak the driver settings a bit to fix that though and interestingly enough, as a quick fix turning 'toner save' on improves things dramatically. As you may have guessed laser printers cant print on photo paper so if high quality photos are your game a laser printer isn't right for you.

The output itself has a nice magazine like waxy feel to it and can be used straight away. If you are coming from a inkjet printer background this is a joy as you can pick up rich documents full of colour and not have to worry about smudging them or getting your hands dirty.

Noise:

Unless you are a heavy user, most of the time the printer will be in standby mode which as you can guess is pretty much silent. When it spins up the noise is quite noticeable however, comparable to the fan noise in a noisy PC I'd say. Its quite a subtle white noise though and possibly not as irritating as the swishing back and forth of an inkjet head.

Drivers:

The OKI's drivers are available for many platforms, interestingly enough including 64bit versions for both Vista and XP. This is a good effort on OKI's part and is certainly above average. They appear to be considerably better written than HP's (which isn't hard I have to say) and additionally for Windows you also get some very nice colour matching utilities (I apologise but I don't know if these are available for other platforms or not).

Consumables:

One thing which is interesting about the OKI's consumables is the toner is separate from the drums. This makes replacing empty toners a significantly cheaper process than on machines where they are combined. Whether its more economical in the long run depends on the drum life but I would imagine having things this way around will be beneficial.

Conclusion

Overall I'm very happy I took the risk and bought the OKI. Its a well built good quality, fast and sturdy printer. I will still keep my old inkjet for photo's on photo-paper but this will become the main printer. Just being able to collect my prints without getting inky fingers is enough on its own to make me convinced it was money well spent.

Posted by Daniel: 17:45, Wed 11th Apr 2007