Oki C3450 review

Oki's C3450 takes up less room than Lexmark's enormous C500n, but it's still a large box made of two-tone grey plastic.

The network setup wizard immediately detected our printer. It also installed Oki's Status Monitor. This replicates the menu options you'd find on the LCD screen of a more advanced printer, but we found it unwieldy. We preferred the web interface, which provided a full set of monitoring and configuration tools, once we had logged in as the administrator with the username and password provided in the Network Guide.

The driver defaults to an enhanced 600x1,200dpi resolution rather than the printer's standard 600x600dpi mode. Both modes had similar print speeds. There's also a Q2400 mode, which simulates 600x2,400dpi. We used this to print our test photos and small font size test, but the enhanced resolution was of little benefit. We found 5pt and 6pt text sketchy and difficult to read.

However, text printed at 8pt and above was clear, dark and sharp. We were impressed by the vivid rendering of colour diagrams, charts and illustrations in our mixed-colour document test, although some appeared over-saturated. The colour toner produced a glossy and professional finish on even cheap paper. The inaccurate colour became more pronounced in our photographic image prints. The driver defaults to composite black, which gave prints a magenta tint. Forcing the printer to use true black produced dull images with harsh colour transitions and dithering in dark areas. Greyscale images also fared badly, with most pale grey shades rendered as pure white.

The C3450 put in a solid performance in our print speed tests. Both plain text and image-laden colour documents printed quickly, at 18.1ppm and 13.5ppm respectively, and our first page of mono text printed in 11 seconds from standby. Unfortunately, the C3450's poor colour print quality and barely legible rendering of small fonts limits its usefulness, despite fairly reasonable print and ownership costs. We prefer Epson's Aculaser C2800N.