OKI C5400n review

Gallery

Verdict:

The C5400n shares the C5200n's decent paper handling and robust duty cycle, but also its compromised colour print quality. This won't endear it to the sort of users that need its PostScript support, except where low running costs are paramount.

Review Date: 17 Dec 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Oki's C5400n is fundamentally the same printer as the C5200n, but with a few important differences.

It's a PostScript device, and to help it tackle the extra processing Oki has fitted it with twice the C5200n's 32MB of memory and double the processor's clockspeed to 400MHz. It also comes with a standard parallel interface, but these improvements cost a further £314 over the host-based model.

Both printers can be expanded with a duplex unit, but only the C5400n can be fitted with an optional hard disk drive. They can be upgraded with up to 256MB of additional memory, but this gives the C5400n a higher maximum of 320MB due to its standard 64MB.

The C5400n's setup program installs a PostScript driver by default. We used this for our testing and found that on our simple mono jobs the printer's performance was indistinguishable from that of the C5200n, at roughly 18ppm.

Despite the C5400n's higher specification, we were surprised by the extent to which it lagged behind its cheaper sibling in more complex tests. Its speed on our mixed-colour document was less than half that of the C5200n, and it was also around half as quick to print our photo tests. The four-pass Lexmark C510n was able to outperform it on all but one of our tests.

We assumed that this slower performance was due directly to the processing required by a complex PostScript job, and wanted to confirm this by re-running our tests using the printer's PCL driver. Unfortunately, this produced errors when spooling documents and they wouldn't print. We downloaded a newer driver from Oki, but this failed to install.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

< Previous Reviews : Printers Next >

Sponsored Links

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.