Colour LED page printer
Product: OKI C7200n (see also: other 7000 series models)
From: OKI (www.thecolourofbusiness.com)
For: Windows 3.x, 9x/NT/2000, Mac OS
Price: C$5999
Pros: Single-pass colour. Fast (12 ppm) colour, 20 ppm mono; 600x1200 dpi; 64 MB up to 1024 MB; PCL 5c PS3; IEEE 1284 and USB 1.1; 10/100Base Ethernet card standard.
Cons: Some issues with colour matching, which can be worked around with manual adjustments via the front panel.
Strongest Competitors: HP LaserJet 4500N, Brother HL2400C
Intro
The printing of full-colour pages, as those familiar with the term CMYK are familiar, is most often accomplished by the separate application of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks, or, as the case may be, toner hues. Most colour lasers shuttle the paper back and forth four separate times through their mechanisms, applying each of these hue in turn, before spitting out the finished page. As you can imagine, this procedure takes time.
OKI, which has long used a lower-cost light-emitting diode (LED) array instead of a laser beam to record the image to be printed onto the drum of its printers has refined this technique by creating a printer with four in-line LED heads, which allows each colour page to be printed in one pass. It uses four separate drums -- a design that allows for a perfectly straight manual feed paper path and speedy 12 page-per-minute performance in full 600x1200-dpi colour. This design, which uses separate toner cartridges, also promises to reduce consumable costs, as you don't need to replace all the colours at once -- a blessing if, like us, your corporate documents tend to favour a specific range of colours.
Interestingly, the printer is smart enough to figure out whether the page is colour or monochrome; if the three colour drums are not needed, it automatically moves them out of the way and monochrome printing proceeds at up to 20 ppm.
The Hardware
With a shipping weight of 132 lbs., the unit is decidedly beefy, but not unduly so, when compared to other color page printers in its class. This is primarily due to the fact that its in-line LED arrays eliminate the need for the laser, lens-and-mirrors mechanisms that add bulk and sabotage speeds in colour lasers, most of which deliver around 4 to 5 ppm. The OKI engine's life expectancy is rated at 600,000 pages or 5 years, based on a maximum duty cycle of 50,000 pages per month.
At the heart of the C7200n is a 400MHz PowerPC processor, and 64MB of RAM. For maximum performance, this RAM allocation can be boosted to a whopping 1024MB, reducing the need for slower disk-based virtual memory.
The C7200n unit we tested was configured with a 10/100baseT Ethernet connector; parallel and USB ports are also provided. The base model in the 7000 series ($3499 US) is available without Ethernet; the C7200dn provides a full-duplexing option (allowing printing on both sides of a page without manual intervention) and a 5GB hard drive, providing speedier handling of the massive temporary files the system's Adobe PostScript 3 interpreter generates as it rasterizes hi-res 600x1200-dpi pages. Other models in the series provide additional options, all the way up to the high-end C7400, capable of doubling the output resolution to 1200x1200 dpi. See the OKI site for details.
It is also notable that OKI claims the printer to be virtually ozone free in use, allowing unrestricted placement in your office environment. As users of laser printers may know, such units typically emit a significant amount of potentially harmful ozone, making them unsuitable for use in poorly ventilated areas -- as production and equipment rooms so often seem to be.
The Software
OKI supplies an administration utility with its 7000 series units called AdminManager. This utility automatically searches the network for installed network servers and lets you assign the printer to various servers. As well, it provides options for managing the print queue and determining the printer's status.
Another intriguing feature of the printers is a built in web server. With it, a printer that needs to be configured, reset or otherwise administered can be accessed from any web browser, simply by entering its IP address! In addition to the obvious benefits, this also means that the printer is easily managed, whether the admin is using a PC, Mac or some other platform.
Functions that can be controlled via the Web include:
The printer supports both (genuine) Adobe PostScript Level 3 and PCL5c emulations, although only the PostScript option is supported on the Mac.
Market Stats
The market research firm Dataquest predicts that, by the year 2004 the market for colour network printers will grow ten-fold. This isn't surprising, given the near total dominance that colour inkjet units now hold on the desktop, and the fact that toner-based printers deliver a vastly superior price-per page value. What is surprising to us is the fact that so many offices continue to output presentation handouts, promotional literature and other graphics-intensive pages with monochrome lasers, when alternatives like this are available.
For Further Reading
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