Oki C3400N review

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Verdict:

The C3400N is a very fast colour printer for the money, but its results are poor. It's around as expensive to run as Samsung's CLP-300N, but it's far bulkier and is harder to set up and maintain. Lexmark's C530dn costs only £2 more, is cheaper to run and more highly specified. It's not much slower in colour and produces far better result.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: £305

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Strictly speaking, Oki's C3400N isn't a laser printer as it uses LED light to build the page image on its photoconductor drums.

It's a single-pass device with four toners and four drums that are replaced separately. If you print more than 50,000 pages you may also need to replace the transfer belt and fuser unit, making a total of 10 consumables to change.

Even light users will get used to swapping the C3400Nfs toners. Its starter cartridges are rated for a stingy 500 pages and full-capacity supplies last for just 1,000 pages, so you'll need to change them fairly often throughout the printer's life.

Its high number of consumables make the C3400N potentially complex to maintain, and we also found it hard to set up. There's little in the way of physical preparation before you can start printing, but Oki's install program couldn't find the printer across our simple network. With no display you have to print a status sheet to find the printer's IP address, and we had to look in the manual to find out how. The installer completed successfully once we'd supplied it with the printer's address, but it's an unnecessary extra headache.

This is quite a fast printer, and it produces excellent text with crisp outlines even at sizes as tiny as 2pt. It's hard to spot any dithering in small colour text, which looks smooth as a result, but graphics and photos were extremely disappointing. Oki's toners give prints a consistent gloss finish, but graphics look grainy and suffer from a magenta cast that makes the colours in photos look far different from those of the original. Blue and red components were vertically misaligned in blue headline text, giving it a fine but noticeable red shadow.

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