Oki C710CN Review June 27, 2011 11:55 by Matt Bird

Overview

This is a workgroup level LED colour printer, designed to handle single and double-sided documents at high speed. While that speed isn't quite as high as OKI seems to think, it's duplex speed is one of the best available. Print quality is high, with the exception of photo prints, which are a bit gaudy. Running costs are good in comparison with other machines aimed at this market and paper handling is easily expandable, up to nearly 1,700 sheets. This is a good printer offering plenty of scope for general office duties.

Ratings

Oki C710cn

Main Review

This is a colour laser printer for a small to medium-sized workgroup and has a couple of extra features which could endear it to an office manager trying to keep costs down. The machine's idiosyncratic, rounded lines house a print engine with an LED, rather than a laser print engine, high-yield consumables, duplex print and a full 530-sheet main paper tray. The OKI C710dn’s control panel is set into the sloping front edge of its top and includes a fully bitmapped, backlit LCD display which can show text or graphics. Control buttons are clearly marked, apart from a large one at the left-hand end, which opens the top cover for access to toner and drum units. A pull-down tray at the front provides a 100-sheet multipurpose feed for special media and two extra 530-sheet trays can be added as options. At the back, there are sockets for USB, Ethernet and legacy parallel connections. The separate drum and toner cartridges, a pair for each colour, are linked together but come apart rather too easily, so need care when you’re setting up the machine or replacing them. PCL and PostScript drivers are provided for Windows and OS X. OKI rates the C710dn at 32ppm for black and 30ppm for colour, but we saw only about two thirds of those speeds, with black text varying between 9ppm and 19ppm, depending on the length of the document. Colour print, on a five page document, returned a speed of 8.3ppm. Where the printer excels, though, is in duplex print. We normally see around half the speed of a single-sided print, but on this machine a 20-side duplex document returned a speed of 17.7 sides per minute, very close to its top speed. The C710dn could be set to duplex by default, with very little speed penalty. Print quality for general office duties is fine, with crisp, densely-black text and bright, vibrant colours. By default, some greens and blues come out dark and there is some mis-registration of black text over colour, but neither of these problems is particularly marked. It's not the ideal printer for reproducing colour photos, as the range of available hues is limited, giving an over-exaggerated brilliance to natural scenes. There are a lot of consumables to consider in this machine, but fortunately several of them have long service lives. The toner cartridges last for 11,000 pages, while drums last for 15,000 or 20,000 and the fuser and the transfer belt are 60,000 page components. Pricing them all at Stinky Ink prices gives a cost per page of 1.7p for an ISO black page and 7.5p for an ISO colour one. Both these costs are very competitive with other machines aimed at the same market.