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Oki MC562dnw review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £630
inc VAT

A high price, expensive consumables and a clumsy interface detract from this MFP's fast speeds and glossy document prints

The Oki MC562dnw colour LED MFP annoyed us immediately by requiring us to enter its default administrator password before we could connect it to our wireless network. The password is buried in the MFP’s extremely comprehensive 129-page setup guide. Rather than opting for a usual default of “admin” or similar, Oki’s default password is an unguessable “aaaaaa”. Note that enabling Wi-Fi disables the MFP’s low-power sleep mode.

Oki MC562dnw

The five-line mono LCD display gives you access to a massive array of features, but the menu system is rather complex, particularly when compared to the streamlined touchscreen displays of many rival MFPs. Unfortunately, in a test environment packed with wireless devices using the 2.4GHz band, we found that the MC562dnw seemed to have difficulty maintaining a wireless connection, leading to slow print speeds in repeated tests. Because of this we carried out our tests using a wired network connection. The MFP also has a USB port for direct connection to a PC, but this chunky workgroup printer isn’t really the sort of thing you’d want to have sitting on your desk.

Oki MC562dnw

The MFP defaults to duplex printing, which saves paper. It’s quite a bit slower than simplex (single-sided) printing, though. Ten colour pages printed on five sheets of paper emerged in 1m 8s. That’s a speed of 8.8ppm, compared to a significantly faster simplex colour print speed of 19.7ppm. Mono prints came out at a quick 24.2ppm.

Mono 12pt text quality was as good as you’d expect from a laser or LED printer: sharp, dark and crisp. Even the challenging 8pt serif text in some of our mixed-colour pages looked pretty good, although close examination revealed some slightly jagged edges. The colour illustrations were pleasingly glossy and shaded areas were smooth, but the overall effect was very intense and oversaturated. This isn’t too much of a problem when it comes to graphs and diagrams but showed up badly on our photo prints. Here a black and white image looked mauve, pale skin tones looked jaundiced and a low-contrast colour image just looked rather murky.

Oki MC562dnw

We were pleased to find that colour copy quality was good, although again a little oversaturated. Even small text was fairly sharp in both mono and colour copies. Mono copies of images tended to be very dark, though, and suffered poor contrast even when we lightened them up. A ten-page mono copy via the surprisingly noisy ADF took 35s, while both colour and mono single-sheet copies from the platen took 14s.

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Basic Specifications

Rating***
Maximum native print resolution1,200x600dpi
Max optical resolution1,200×1,200dpi
Output bit depth24-bit

Quoted Speeds

Quoted speed, mono A426ppm
Quoted speed, colour A430ppm

Tested Print Speeds

Time for two 10x8in photos 1.025s
Time for six 6x4in photos 1.028s

Physical and Environmental

Standard printer interfacesUSB, 10/100 Ethernet, 802.11n wireless
Optional printer interfacesnone
Size444x427x509mm
Weight29.0kg
Noise (in normal use)54dB(A)
Duty cycle60,000 pages

Paper Handling

Maximum paper sizeA4
Maximum paper weight220gsm
Standard paper inputs2
Standard paper input capacity350
Maximum paper inputs3
Maximum paper input capacity880
Duplex (code, cost if option)Yes

General

Printer technologysingle-pass colour laser
Language(s)PCL5c, PCL6, PostScript 3 emulation, SIDM
Supported operating systemsWindows XP/Vista/7/9, Mac OS X 10.3.9+
Maximum printer memory512MB
Other laser features and options£58

Buying Information

Price£630
Price per colour A4 page8.6p
Price of 2nd paper cassette£212
Warrantythree years RTB (with registration)
Supplierhttp://www.printerland.co.uk
Detailswww.oki.co.uk

Tested Scan Speeds

Full scan area preview12s
A4 document at 150dpi17s
A4 document at 300dpi43s
6x4in photo at 600dpi49s
6x4in photo at 1200dpi51s
Single 35mm negative at 2400dpiN/A

Tested Copy Speeds

Time for single A4 mono copy 1.014s
Time for single A4 colour copy 1.014s
Time for 10 A4 copies using feeder 2.035s

Copy Features

Maximum number of copies99
Copier zoom range25-400%
Max mono copy resolution600x600dpi
Max colour copy resolution600x600dpi

Fax Features

Fax modem speed33.6Kbit/s
Fax memory (maximum mono pages)200