Oki C6000dn – Good Laser Printer

Pros

The Oki C6000dn is a network ready printer, offering really fast prints, the text print quality for the printer is really decent, the black prints are affordable and the printer gets generous support from Oki.

Cons

The Oki C6000dn’s black print aren’t dark enough; the printer has really huge footprint and the graphics prints from the printer were a tad muddied and even on the expensive side.

Introduction

The Oki C6000dn with its high suggested monthly print volume and fast print speeds obviously is a printer targeting small work groups or office. The best thing here is that priced only at $700 the C6000dn, actually is a fully-loaded, network-ready printer which delivers really great text quality and so-so graphics prints. You can even get a built-in duplexer, but for that you’ll have to pay additional $150. Although, there isn’t any serious flaw with the C6000dn, but if you don’t mind slightly slower print speeds, we would suggest the cheaper Lexmark C530dn. The Lexmark offers both a duplexer and built-in networking in addition to slightly better print quality and all that at $200 less. And if you need print speed more that print quality, then we suggest you go for the Dell 3110cn priced at $500, it delivers the speed equal to Oki C6000n, but the print quality for this printer is really unimpressive.

Design

The one thing that you should keep in mind when you are going for the Oki C6000dn is that the C6000dn is a behemoth of a printer. The C6000dn is deeper than it is tall or wide, due to its parallel orientation of the toner cartridges. The printer measures 17.1 inches by 13.4 inches by 24.3 inches (H x W x D), and weighs slightly more than 57 pounds. The difference in weight here could be attributed to built-in duplexer. The body of the printer is putty-colored and is all business, and it becomes very clear with the very first look at the printer.

The media handling for the C6000dn is pretty straight. The printer comes with a 300 sheet standard input paper tray which can hold legal-length paper and a multipurpose tray which easily can hold 100 sheets of paper. The multipurpose tray juts out from the front panel of the printer. The multipurpose tray of the printer comes with a built-in arm which swings to support the extra sized media types subjected to printer. There again is an option of getting an optional input tray for $185 and capacity of $530. The output sheet on top of the printer stores the outputted sheets.

The control panel for the printer is rather basic, and comprises of just two-line text LCD, a backlit, buttons for canceling a print job and for taking the printer offline and menu navigation buttons. The menu options for the printer are easy to peruse and understand. The usage menu of the printer is immensely useful as it gives clear indication of life is left for different consumables used in printer, like the drums, toner, belt and fusers.

System Configuration

Price: $1,059.00
Manufacturer: Oki Printing Solutions
Part Number: 62429503
Printer Type: Workgroup printer – LED – Color
Copier Type: None
Dimensions (W x D x H): 17.1 x 24.3 x 13.4 inches

System weight: 63.9 lbs
Supported Media Type: Banners,   Labels,   Index cards,   Envelopes,   Glossy paper,   Plain paper and Transparencies
Software Included: OKI Print Supervision, Drivers & Utilities and Oki LAN Embedded Web Server
OS Required: Apple MacOS 9.1 or later,   Microsoft Windows Vista,   Apple MacOS X 10.1 or later, Microsoft Windows NT 4.0,   Microsoft Windows 98/ME/2000/XP and Microsoft Windows Server 2003
Printer Features: Single Pass Color Digital technology
Power Device: Power supply – Internal

Performance

The Oki C6000dn for sure is one of the fastest color laser printer we’ve seen in our labs and it also is one of the more expensive ones. The printer printed in the black printing test, and printed text at the rate of 23.46ppm (pages per minute) and graphics prints at the rate of 22.51ppm (pages per minute). Though for color prints, the speed of the printer came down a little bit, but still wasn’t all that bad and was in sync with the competition by printing 13.60ppm for color graphics and 14.78ppm for color text.

The print quality of Oki C6000dn was a tad irregular, though it still was superb with the text prints, but for the graphics print the quality dropped a little. The black text printed w as clean and sharp, though it still could’ve been darker. The color text prints also were of decent quality with sharp edges, and constantly formed characters, and well-blended colors. Overall, the quality of C6000dn was decent, but still we loved the Lexmark C530dn priced at $500 more.

Support

The Oki C6000dn gets one-year standard warranty from the company. The warranty here includes overnight replacement for faulty units. There also are 24×7 free, toll-free telephonic supports available with the printer. You can also mail the support staff of Oki 24×7, but in order to get priority you got to be registered on Oki site. The web site also offers product-specific utilities and drivers, user guides and downloadable manuals, a knowledge base and a comprehensive list of consumables for every model.

Word from the Experts

The Oki C6000dn offers decent print speeds like any other decent laser printer, in addition to superb print quality offered with monochrome prints. Though, the printer is a tad pricey and slows down significantly with color prints. But if you are looking for a printer for a small work group with high volume of print needs, then this is a decent option to go with.