Oki B2540 MFP review

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Verdict:

Little about our experience installing and using the B2540 MFP gave us cause for enthusiasm. Although it's quite affordable to buy, it has a higher cost per page than the other two MFPs, and a higher cost of ownership for anyone but the lightest users. It's not a good choice.

Review Date: 17 May 2007

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 1 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Oki's B2540 MFP isn't particularly easy to set up or use.

It isn't too tricky to insert the printer's single consumable or to clip on the ADF's input tray, but the Ethernet port is covered by a pointless sticker that's hard to remove. Oki's installation software doesn't make it immediately clear what the point of each bundled software package is, and we weren't sure which of the applications contained the print drivers and scanning software. Installing this didn't seem to install a driver, and we had to run Install a Network or WiFi Printer from the Companion Suite program group to get the device working. The printer supports the PCL and PostScript languages, but it was hard to tell whether one option was a PCL driver or host-based driver.

The B2540 MFP's printer is rated at a slow 16ppm, and it got close to this only on our formal-letter test. It was unusually slow when printing greyscale graphics, and the results were granular, with obvious dithering patterns. The smooth gradient in the background of our presentation slides printed as a near-black area.

The output tray's paper stop didn't prevent an untidy collection of printed pages. We rearranged this paper back into a neat stack, but the printer jammed when we tried to print manually on the unused side, beeping ceaselessly the moment we removed the paper tray to clear it.

The front panel has a USB port that supports direct printing and scanning, but you can scan directly to a PC only via USB, rather than a network connection. The scanner was slow, and produced softly focused results with some noise visible in dark areas. Copies were the slowest of the three MFPs here, and were too dark.

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