OKI C3300n review

Oki's C3300n is a single-pass colour laser with a standard network port.

As with the two other printers we've reviewed this month, the C3300n arrives with its consumables already inserted. Each toner must be lifted out to have some packaging removed before being locked back into place. Plain paper is stored in a 250-sheet cassette and printed pages collect in a 150-sheet output tray.

Oki's installation program was unable to detect the C3300n over our labs' network. The printer has no display panel, but we manually printed a status page, which showed that it had leased an IP address successfully. The installer completed successfully once we had given it this address, but this step shouldn't be necessary on a simple DHCP-enabled network.

We've become used to affordable laser printers arriving with starter toners, which have a lower capacity than the full-yield replacements you'll buy when they are empty. Even so, the C3300n gave us a shock, as its starter cartridges are rated for just 500 pages printed at five per cent coverage per colour. This is the lowest rating we've ever seen for starter cartridges and you'll soon have to buy some more.

Things don't get a lot better when you buy brand new cartridges, as these are rated at a yield of just 1,000 pages. By the time you replace one of the four photoconductor drums, after around 15,000 pages, you may have replaced the relevant toner 15 times. Using Oki's yield figures, it goes without saying that this is an expensive printer to run. However, after performing our standard tests, we printed 1,179 copies of our mono letter before exhausting the toner, suggesting that Oki's page yield figures are pessimistic.

The C3300n printed excellent black text, but its colour output was lacking. Graphics weren't as grainy as the results we've seen from other Oki colour lasers, but inaccurate colours make them seem overly warm.

Photos were printed with a rosy bias that extended to our black-and-white test print. We obtained the best results by selecting the driver's greyscale mode manually. The driver's Photo Enhance option boosted the contrast of colour prints, making most subjects look unnatural. We preferred the results without this option selected.

The C3300n is a faster colour printer than other entry-level lasers we've tested. However, business users will find it time-consuming and costly to maintain. Home users after a simple and cost-effective network colour laser should pick HP's Color LaserJet 2600n or the network version of Epson's AcuLaser C1100.