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OKI’s C310DN colour laser is aimed at small businesses and workgroups. As such, it’s not the smallest of devices; weighing 22 kilos and taking up substantially more space than entry-level printers. It’s well-specified, with a built-in duplexer, and there’s a three-year warranty, though be sure to register your purchase to benefit.
More importantly this is a single-pass colour printer, where all four colours are laid down onto the page as it journeys once through the printer. Cheaper colour laser printers such as the Samsung CLP-315 review create a full-colour page by overlaying black, cyan, magenta and yellow images one after the other; usually this means they print in colour roughly as quarter as quickly as they do in black and white. The C310DN doesn’t have that problem, and, according to OKI, will print 24 mono pages per minute (ppm) or 22ppm in colour.
In our tests, which include the time taken to process a print job, it was acceptably close to OKI’s speed claims, with colour pages barely any slower than black-only ones. Printing on both sides unsurprisingly halved the speed, to 11 black pages per minute (ppm). Although it’s not aimed at home users, the 310dn is fairly quiet – impressive given those quick print speeds.
It’s shipped with its consumables already in place, so you don’t have to get to grips with how they fit straight away. With paper loaded into the 250-sheet main tray and a network cable clipped into the back, the printer is ready to roll. Installing the driver is a little more long-winded than we’d like, especially if you need to repeat the process on many network computers. It’s straightforward, though, and leads to a wizard that lets you change the language of the printer’s LCD display if needed.
While the C310DN prints quickly, the results are mixed. Black text was sharp and clear, but colour prints suffered from the same brownish bias that we’ve seen from other OKI colour lasers. This can suit some subjects, producing flattering skin tones, but it results in slightly dull business graphics. OKI’s toners lend images a fairly rich sheen – it’s a matter of taste whether you prefer this to more typically matte results.
Ultimately this is less of a concern than the printer’s cost. Though well-equipped, it’s significantly more expensive than entry-level models, and not greatly cheaper to run. At roughly £60, each colour toner is rated only for around 2,000 pages, meaning that even if you never need to replace the drum (20,000 pages), fuser or transfer belt (60,000 pages), each colour page still costs more than 9p.
It’s the higher than average per-page cost, combined with its less than vibrant graphics, that deter us from recommending the C310DN.
