One motivation for writing this review is some important misinformation in a previous review. At any rate, I could not decide between the OKI 5200 and the HP 2600. At my local office supply store, they sat side-by-side, and thanks to two different $100 rebate offers (one instant, one mail-in) for the OKI, they were the exact same price. My decades-long favorable experiences with everything HP I had purchased (including a mono laser printer) had me strongly leaning toward the HP. The sample test prints made by each showed them very close in quality, with the HP doing a slightly better job at printing graphics. A big difference is that the OKI''s prints are high gloss. Even the lettering is gloss, when printing no graphics, on plain white paper. So imagine every letter you print with the OKI having glossy black type regardless of what paper you use. If that''s something you like, the OKI will not disappoint. For normal use, I personally find it a bit strange. It so happens that I was buying the OKI primarily for the printing of color brochures, and the glossy output was perfect for that. So I went with the OKI against my better judgement, but in love with the glossy prints.I really don''t know whether I made the right decision, all things considered, because I don''t have the HP 2600 to compare against. The OKI has an enormous footprint making it difficult to find a place to park it. It also weighs 50+ pounds. The HP has a great and stylistic design that allows a MUCH smaller footprint. Something to keep in mind before you purchase, as it''s a problem for me now. I am going to obtain a separate low cart and place the OKI on that.
The various toner cartidges inside the OKI are horizontally arranged. Lifting the long cover to its full height (requiring a lot of free space to do so), one then reaches over the long bank of toner cartridges to access the rearmost colors. The HP 2600, on the other hand, has an extremely easy access design, with all the cartridges available at the FRONT of the printer, in vertical array.
The OKI does produce oustanding text (with the warning that it is high gloss and there''s nothing you can do about it) that is crisp and clean down to small font sizes. Printing photos is another story. Relative to other color laser printers in this price range, small photos (which I use a lot of for brochure printing) print about average. However, the OKI photo printing would not even match a cheap inkjet printer from five years ago. There are several color printing tweaks available, and I found that using the OKI''s sRGB color space worked a bit better than the other settings. Color lasers have a long way to go when it comes to quality photo printing. They key is to keep the photos small, somewhere under 3" x 3" .
The OKI build construction is good. Preparing for first-time use requires about 25 minutes of removing tapes, straps, and shipping blocks located all over, under and inside the unit. Be certain to keep the cartridges level in your hands whilst you''re removing all the protective tapes from it. I managed to spill some cyan toner on my pants. Driver installation went perfectly, in contrast to some aggravating hacking I''ve had to do when installing HP laser printer drivers.
The OKI fired up properly (if noisily) the very first time, and the intitial test page was perfect. While the print speed is quite good, the warmup time is not. The HP will get you prints from a cold start much quicker -but the printing speed is slow.
Documentation includes a handy and useful booklet that attaches to the side of the printer. The manual itself is lacking in detail. The setup guide was ambiguous and not very helpful.
The built-in Ethernet card is a nice addition, but also found on other color lasers in this price range. Setup for this part is intimidating and not for the faint of heart.
I use 65 pound stock for the brochures I print, which means I have to use the Multi Purpose Tray to load the sheets, and flip open a rear paper stacker so that the stock shoots straight through the printer and out the back. Recall that the printer footprint is already deep, and now I have to allow another foot of room for the sheets to feed out the back. Further, the Multi Purpose Tray is very kludgy to use.
Now for the sobering aspect of OKI ownership (and other color lasers as well). There is bad news, and worse news. Bad -it costs more to purchase a new set of toner cartridges than it cost to purchase a new OKI. The high capacity (5k pages, NOT 50k as mentioned in a previous review) toner cartridges for this printer are $62 for black and $142.50 for the other colors. If you purchase the rainbow pack (all colors at once) you save 10% and pay a mere $440.15. Folks, I paid $400 for this printer brand new after mail-in rebate. Things get worse, as the OKI uses separate drums, one for each color also, and they cost $100 each as well. When you change a drum, OKI recommends you change the cartridge. OKI claims the drums are good for 50k pages. When you thought things couldn''t get worse -well, they do. OKI, unlike HP, is one of those companies that provides only a starter set of toner cartridges (rated at 3k pages). The ugly fact is that once you fork out the dollars for OKI 2600, in only 3k pages you''ll be facing the peculiar decision of forking out $440.15 for new cartridges, or buying a new color laser for LESS. By 50k pages, you''ll be needing some $845 to buy new drums and cartridges. Better start scouting out a convenient dumpster in which to unload your 50-pound hunk of plastic.
The bottom line for me is that the OKI produces some great glossy brochures that just pop with crisp color. Unfortunately, it is not easy to print these brochures due to the kludgy Multi Purpose Tray. For other uses, especially if you''re not seeking the glossy look for everything you print, you may want to check out the competition. I''m personally not looking forward to another major financial outlay at 3k pages, as detailed above.
I previously owned a Konica-Minolta Magicolor 2400 W Color Laser that I returned. A lesson I learned from that printer is that some color lasers are power hogs. My home office is in an older house (120+ yrs old) with typical home-sized circuitry. The K-M caused the lights to flicker when on. The power consumption on this one is very reasonable.
As previously noted, this printer is big. It is 2 ft deep without the straight path outlet tray open. The top opens like a car hood to access the consumables. While this makes it easy to get to them, you can''t put this printer anywhere you don''t have clearance over it. Measure carefully before you buy. It is also heavy...almost 60 lbs.
Set up was a snap and the instructions were good. Once in place, hookup and installation was easy, as this is not on a network. Just plug in two cords and run the installation software.
The first sample turned out to be defective after about a month. (That can happen to anything.) Oki Customer Support shipped me a refurbished unit overnight and mailed me a lable to ship the defective unit back. Fedex would even come and pick it up.
While getting a refurbished unit was expected, it came with no consumables...toner, drums, fuser and belt. No problem with this printer, tho, because the top opens and everything comes out and back in easily. So swapping everything from one to the other was easy and I was back up and running in no time.
This is where I had a minor problem. The defective printer had less than 300 pages on it. The replacement had a page count of more than 3000. The printer (as most do) judges the life of all consumables based on the page count, so my 99% full toner cartridges were now detected to be only 67% full with a corrosponding decrease in the remaining life of the belt, fuser, and drums. Since this printer will stop working when it thinks it is out of toner, I would have to replace all toners when they still have 1/3 of their life left in them! (The older firmware version of the replacement printer was a minor issue.)
I called Customer Service back with the above concerns. They said there was no way to reset the page count on the printer after servicing, but they agreed to my concerns. They sent me a brand new printer (also overnight) with all new consumables. Fedex came and took the old one away a couple of days later.
The new printer has been running satisfactorily for about 4 months now with no problem. I print mostly on regular 20 lb paper but have done business card stock, Avery lables, check stock, envelopes, and card stock. I have even used lables and envelopes that said "inkjet only not for laser printers" with no problems using both the standard tray and the multipurpose tray. The instructions suggest using the straight thru method for envelopes, card stock, and lables, but all come out fine making the turn thru the normal path.
Contrary to the whining in the previoius post about all the toners running out at once...that is not likely. Depending on your usage, the black will be out first. The others will likely last a lot longer. As far as price, the cost of one black cartridge is far less than the 7 inkjet cartridges (At $30 ea.)I would need for the same 5000 pages on my HP 6540 inkjet.
As an aside, the price of consumables is comparable with other color lasers. If you use the cost of consumables as a basis, the 7 injet cartridges far exceeds the cost of that printer, too. (Not factoring in color ones.)
I do mostly black and white printing and have the defaults set to only use the black cartridge in draft mode. (Still good quality for most uses.) This extends the life of the color toners. The default settings are easy to set using the front panel controls.
The shiny printing takes some getting used to, but I can live with it.
The color pictures (graphics and photographs) I have done have looked good, tho not as good as a good inkjet, but from reading other reviews, neither does any laser.
The only cons are warmup times and noise. Compared to some other lasers I demo-ed in the store this one is a bit noisier especially when warming up, but still bearable. (But then I go back to the old dot matrix printer days, so I guess noise is relative.)
It also takes approx 1 min 55 sec for the first page to come out when the printer is in standby (power saving) mode. Successive print jobs take about 40 seconds for the first page. After that is is fast and quiet.
Overall I am happy with the printer, very satisfied with the customer support, and would recommend this printer. I would give it 4.5 stars if possible, and 5 if it were quieter.
Buy Okidata C5200N LED Color Printer Now
As an IT Manager, I had heard good things about OKI color printers and purchased my first one almost two years ago -it now has almost 30,000 copies on it and (other than consumables) has required no service attention.Pluses: Color and image quality ROCKS! Comes with network card already installed. Rarely jams, and easy to clear jams if the occur. Easily replacable and widely available toner and drums (and, if you check out a well-known online auction site, aftermarket drum reset kits are available which will save you about $300 when the printer hits 15,000 copies).
Only one negative: Network install/use can be a bit quirky (print jobs sometimes jam in printer que for no reason, but the network admin. can easily reset without rebooting).
Bottom line: I''m now using only OKI 5150/5200n''s (8 total) in our three store locations. For a mid-priced color laser, the 5200n deserves a serious look.
Read Best Reviews of Okidata C5200N LED Color Printer Here
I''ve had the Oki C5200 for almost 5 years... it has been an excellent printer. I was lured into using a cheaper toner that claimed to be 100% compatible with the OEM product. WRONG. 6 months later and my wonderful laser printer is in need of over $800 worth of repair work. It has become very noisy, the black won''t print without smearing, all other colors are skewed, and there are blotches of cyan, magenta, and yellow all over the page!Oki makes an excellent product... just make sure you use the OEM toner.
I just ordered an Oki MC360 MFP from Amazon today for a little over $300 to replace my failing C5200. :(
Want Okidata C5200N LED Color Printer Discount?
The printer has a lot of good features, and works well for about 6 months. Then users are faced with a dual nightmare. The high cost of toner and drums has already been mentioned above in several reviews. Complicate your life with the fact that maintenance problems start to accumulate and make the investment in toner and drum replacements more and more doubtful with every day of use. My printer has had 3 separate visits to the depot repair, and since the printer weighs in at over 50 lbs, that''s no easy task. It has also had at least 6 calls to Tech Support. Still the problem keeps coming back. Now I will buy a product with built in duplexing, and set the OKI in the rear, as a back up only.
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