Oki B2520 MFP – Not Expected Laser Multifunction Printer

Pros

The Oki B2520 MFP is a cheap printer with immense mailbox option for a multi-user environment; offers high-quality color scan; has USB port positioned right at the front of the printer to facilitate printing or scanning and faxing through a USB thumb drive. The printer has manual feed slot and complete QWERTY keyboard to let you enter the e-mail addresses easily.

Cons

The Oki B2520 MFP delivers really slow task speed, has really poor grayscale scan quality average graphics print quality and the printer is not network-ready. To make it even worse there is the complicated control panel which even is not spontaneous. The text LCD of the printer is not backlit, hence reading it in poor lighting is hard and the printer delivers really high per-page costs.

Introduction

At first glance the Oki B2520 MFP seems like a convincing package, delivering all the essential features that you can associate with a multifunction laser printer like print, scan fax and copy and all that at surprising low prices. Although, don’t get lured by the promises made here or what impression this printer give to you, this is because the user interface of the printer is really clunky, the user guide for the system is confusing, the print speeds are slow, and scan and print quality delivered by the system are really disappointing.

Although, we must mention the fact that the Oki B2520 MFP priced at $320 does have some interesting features like a QWERTY keyboard and mailboxes, for small offices. But at the same time the printer is not network-ready that means if you need printer to be operated over a network then you should look somewhere else. Among all the similarly priced mono laser multi-function printers that we’ve reviewed lately, we would recommend the Lexmark X340n first. And even though the Lexmark is a bit expensive, but it will deliver fast prints of decent quality and will also be network-ready.

Design

The Oki B2520 MFP is comparatively smaller in size, considering its multifunction laser printer genre. The Oki B2520 MFP measures 17.6 inches wide by 16.2 inches tall by 15.2 inches deep, and it weighs about 26 pounds. A 50 page Automatic Document Feeder tops the scanner lid and lets you scan and copy the legal-sized documents. Embellishing the frontage of the printer is the USB port for USB thumb drives.

The paper cassette of the printer can store up to 250 sheets and can easily be configured for a wide range of paper size up to legal size. Positioned right above the cassette is a single-sheet manual feed slot along with modifiable paper guides.

The control panel for a printer is pretty straightforward and easy to use, but this is not the case with Oki. A lot of buttons of control panel are puzzlingly labeled. One strange thing that we found here is that the two-line text LCD screen given here is not backlit and hence reading it in real low light is definitely going to be hard. Underneath the LCD there are buttons for stop, menu navigation keys, start, but the system doesn’t have any standard menu call-up button. Though, as per the menu pressing the arrow button brings the menu button, but it is absolutely unintuitive. Positioned just next to the LCD, there are four buttons, out of which three buttons have icons and the last one is labeled ECO.

Positioned just right to the display are the numerical keypad and a complete QWERTY keyboard. Under the numeric keypad there are three buttons, out of which one having three figures was the broadcast fax button; the one having photo of what looked like an open book is for calling up the address book and the last having the universal icon is for volume control and actually is a manual connection for faxing but again its not for intuitive.

System Configuration

Starting price: $69.83 – $250.99
Manufacturer: Oki Printing Solutions
Part Number: 62427701-KIT
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows ME, Microsoft Windows 2000 SP3 or later and Microsoft Windows 98 SE
Printing Technology: Laser Monochrome

Dimensions (W x D x H): 17.6 x 15.2 x 16.2 inches
System weight: 26 lbs
Media Type Supported: Envelopes and Plain paper
PC Connection: USB and USB host
Software Included: Drivers & utilities, Companion Suite Pro and ScanSoft PaperPort SE 10.0
Office Machine Features: Print from USB flash drives and Save to USB flash drive
Power: AC 120 V

Performance

The Oki B2520 MFP’s performance clearly was not up to the mark and the printer let us down big time. The task speed of the printer was really slow and the quality still was missing pretty much. The printer printed at a speed of 10.64 pages per minute and was struggling behind the Lexmark X340n, the Canon ImageClass MF4690 and Dell 1815dn. The printer also was pretty slow at printing the grayscale graphics and delivered the speed of 11.21 pages per minute. The same was the case with all the other tests as well and we found the printing from Oki B2520 MFP to be lagging behind almost every printer we subjected it to.

The same was the case with the black text printing as well and the only decent result that we found was for black text. The black text appeared dark and rich. But the grayscale scanning was pretty disappointing. The results were same for rest of the print quality test as well, and in general the one thing we can say is that the overall print quality for the printer was really poor.

Support

The Oki B2520 MFP comes with a standard one year warranty that includes overnight swap for faulty units. There also is toll-free telephonic support available 24*7. There also is e-mail support through Oki’s support staff 24×7, although the users who are registered with Oki’s website get priority. Oki’s website also provides product-specific downloadable user guides and manuals, drivers and utilities, a knowledge base and a list of consumables for each model.

Word from the Experts

The Oki B2520 MFP is an inexpensive multifunction printer which fails to deliver what it is intended for, in more that one way. The printer delivers low-quality output and has really badly implemented control panel. You clearly can get laser multi-functions printer better than this.