Oki C5200n review

Dan Littman CNET

Published: 21 Oct 2004

The Oki C5200n uses LEDs instead of a laser beam to print a page, but otherwise it operates just like a colour laser printer. Although it doesn't produce real-world documents as fast as its specs -- 24 pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and 16ppm for colour -- lead you to expect, the C5200n's colour speed still beats that of similar models, such as the Brother HL-2700CN, the Lexmark C510 and the HP Color LaserJet 2550L. The affordable £399 (ex. VAT) price tag, which includes an Ethernet interface and fabulous black-text quality, is within reach of a small workgroup seeking a solo printer. In a bigger office, you'd need to pair the C5200n with a high-output greyscale laser such as the Xerox Phaser 4500B.

Design

The putty-coloured Oki C5200n looks utilitarian but sturdy. In some colour laser printers, the paper passes through four separate print jobs, but the Oki C5200n picks up all four colours in one trip through a straight paper path, where four rows of LEDs take the place of a swivelling laser beam. Printers with this single-pass design usually take up lots of desk space, but the C5200n squeezes into a petite footprint, at 40cm wide by 52.8cm deep by 34.2cm high. The C5200n weighs 20kg without consumables installed, which makes it easy to move -- for someone in great shape. You'll have to be creative when lifting the printer, since Oki provides only two handholds along the bottom edges. If you want to deploy the C5200n in a home office, you'll be glad to note the USB 2.0 port next to the Ethernet port. The control panel's backlit LCD angles upward from the printer's front lip to allow people of any height to read it clearly.

The single-pass design makes for simple maintenance. The C5200n's entire top panel, with the four LED arrays affixed to it, opens like a clamshell, exposing vertical slots where the four snap-together toner-and-imaging-drum assemblies drop straight in for easy replacement. For easy access to paper jams, the toner and the drum lift out to expose most of the paper path, and the front wall flops down to reveal more paper-jam sites. A back flap opens to allow stiff or delicate media such as card stock and labels to exit in a straight line, and a durable flap catches outgoing pages instead of letting them drop to the desk or the floor.

The per-page cost of the toner and the imaging drum for the C5200n adds up to a costly 1.2 pence per page, or 1.43 for black, depending on whether you buy 5,000-page or 3,000-page toner cartridges; at 6.49p or 8.12p per page, its colour pages are steep compared to those of colour lasers.

Without documentation, we managed to guess our way through a local installation. We couldn't find server-installation details on Oki's Web site, so your network manager will probably improvise to set up a complicated network. Oki provides drivers for Windows 98 and upwards.

Features

Despite the Oki C5200n's affordability, it's equipped for an office. That's clear when you look at Oki's software, which includes an embedded HTTP server that allows you to check the printer's status and even change its setup over an IP network. A management utility, PrintSuperVision, can report on how much workgroups are printing and at what cost. The printer can also send email alerts when something goes awry.

The basic Oki C5200n model includes a 300-sheet main paper tray and a 100-sheet auxiliary tray. Oki sells an additional 530-page paper tray for a stiff £280 (ex. VAT). The C5200n comes with only 32MB of memory but features an easily accessible slot that can hold a standard DIMM memory module to expand up to 256MB.

The C5200n's control panel is a model of clarity. Along with the backlit LCD and clearly labelled buttons, its hierarchical menu is easy to navigate to set up the printer's IP address, time sleep mode, or adjust colour densities and registration. The driver software provides standard features with useful variations. Unlike those of most printers, Oki's driver allows you to choose the number of pages to fit onto your document when creating a patchwork-style poster. The Oki C5200n also prints banners up to 47in. (119cm) long. But the driver doesn't support manual duplexing, which forces you to opt for the £259 (ex. VAT) duplexer option if you want to conserve paper or create booklets by printing on both sides of a sheet.

Performance

The Oki C5200n delivered well-rounded printing speeds in our tests. Unlike most colour printers, Oki machines print both monochrome and colour at a similar rate; however, the C5200n was unimpressive in our greyscale printing tests, delivering only 13ppm for both text and graphics. But it's the fastest colour printer we've tested, at 8.3ppm for text and 11.45ppm for graphics.

Unlike its speed, the Oki C5200n's print quality fluctuated significantly between greyscale and colour. Black text was perfect; our juries found no defects. The greyscale graphics, while short of flawless, were also very good. On the other hand, both colour text and graphics suffered from colour mismatching, while graphics, despite great detail, were dotty and showed a lot of banding.

Overall, the C5200n went through our tests without serious problems and met our expectations for a colour printer of its class. However, we'd like to see better colour print quality. The printer was tested with its factory-default settings, which can be adjusted for better output.

Service & support

The Oki C5200n warranty provides one year of return to base coverage. Telephone technical support is available between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday.

The C5200n comes with a 20-page on-screen setup guide that does a fine job walking you up to the point of installing driver software, then leaves you on your own to install the drivers. A 100-page on-screen user manual provides good detail on paper handling, the control panel, maintenance and troubleshooting. Oki's Web site offers a sparsely populated knowledge base and downloads -- good for updating drivers if your operating system changes. The spiral-bound, 40-page reference guide includes sticky strips to attach to the printer for a quick review of clearing jams, performing maintenance chores and so on.

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