Speedy, Inexpensive Color Printer Comes at a Price

Oki Data's laserlike LED printer races through pages but leaves color quality behind.

Dan Littman, special to PCWorld.com

The good news about Oki Data's new C7200n color printer is that for about $3222--a bargain compared with color laser printers, some of which cost $1000 more--you can treat the office to a color printer that won't make anyone late to meetings. However, while the C7200 posted admirable results in our speed tests of color graphics and black text, the quality of the color output left something to be desired.

Because Oki Data uses LED technology instead of the more common laser technology, this printer's innovative single-pass design can boost the speed of color output. It paints all four colors onto the page as the paper moves in a straight line past four sets of LED arrays and imaging drums. This design eliminates the laser-printer bottleneck of imaging each color separately (a laser printer has one laser beam to paint the image and one drum that lays down the four colors sequentially), so it should make printing color especially fast.

Unexpected Performance

In our tests, the C7200 surprised us. We expected the single-pass design to deliver fast color and slow monochrome at its resolution of 600 by 1200. But when we attached it directly to a PC instead of running it over a network, it printed color graphics at 1.2 pages per minute--a little below the average network-printing speed of color lasers on PC World's Top 10 chart--and it whipped out plain black text at 14.4 ppm, which is 2.4 ppm faster than the fastest networked color printer.

Then we ran the C7200 over a network and everything changed. Its color printing speed leapt to 2.3 ppm, a little faster than the next fastest printer, and its text-printing speed slowed somewhat to 11.9 ppm, still the second-best score of all comparable models we've tested recently.

Unfortunately, while its print speeds either met or exceeded our expectations, the C7200's graphics quality was low. Xerox's Phaser 1235, based on the same engine, also had trouble with graphics quality. When we used PostScript, the C7200's default print mode, colors appeared brownish and very dark, as if they'd been singed, and a distracting cross-hatch pattern overlaid everything. When we used PCL 5c, colors popped out with too much red, and the same cross-hatching appeared. (We tested two units and ran their automatic color-correction routines several times, but the image quality remained subpar.) Text output, on the other hand, was accurate, crisp, and very black under both PostScript and PCL.

Office Versatility

Like other printers targeted at the business market, the C7200n has lots of options. You can add a duplexer for $395 and up to two additional 530-sheet paper feeders for $495 each (bringing the unit's total paper capacity to 1690 pages). Oki Data is also developing a color-copier attachment for the C7200, but its price and availability have not been set. An optional, $595, 5GB internal hard drive can store fonts, overlays, and frequently printed documents so that you can leapfrog heavy network traffic.

With the rear paper exit open and its supports unfolded, you can send print jobs through the printer with no bends in the paper path, protecting heavy or stiff media and peel-off labels. If paper does jam, you just pop open the top to expose the entire paper path.

We found the C7200's control-panel menus easy to navigate, even though they were sometimes difficult to see because the LCD had no backlight. The unit comes with a wire-bound manual that can attach to the printer by way of an included Velcro strip; that way, the documentation stays where it's needed most.

No one expects an LED or laser printer to produce the exquisite color of a good ink jet printer. But it should print charts, letterheads, color business graphics, and similar documents well enough to convey information and make a good impression. While the Oki C7200's color print quality is adequate for that purpose, it's not as good as the quality of many of the color laser printers PC World has tested. Still, its fine text quality, great performance, and versatility make it a good fit for a busy office.