Oki B4100 review

Oki's B4100 has been around for some time. We awarded it four stars in Labs, Shopper July 2005, when it cost £113 including VAT. We wanted to see how well it compared to newer printers now its price has dropped by £43.

The B4100 sits almost as low to the desk as the Brother HL-2040, fully enclosing a 250sheet input cassette. Its face-down output tray has a large capacity, and it's the only printer in the group with a second, face-up output. The printer's multipurpose feed seemed reluctant to fold out. Though paper and envelope orientations are marked, it has no envelope paper type and crumpled those we printed unless we used the face-up output. Its driver offers no support for manual duplexing.

You need to follow the icon-only setup guide and fit the B4100's toner cartridge before it is ready to print. As with our previous review, we found that a small amount of toner spilled out when we removed the orange transit plug covering the toner's slot. Fortunately, Oki's setup program is simple, and we were soon ready to print.

In our tests, the B4100 took more than three times as long as Canon's LBP-3000 to wake from sleep mode and print a single text page. Apart from this, it performed quickly. It was the only printer here to exceed its manufacturer's speed figures in both our text-based tests. It was faster than all but two other printers in our mixed-colour test.

The B4100 prints excellent text with crisp and tidy outlines, but its toner seems more dark grey than black, robbing characters of their full impact. Its graphical output was good, but dark areas seemed comparatively light, reducing the amount of contrast in images. Several printers here exhibited less banding in their graphical prints, too.

Author: Simon Handby