Oki C542dn
Impressively fast with advanced management features, the Oki justifies its comparatively high price
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £272 (£326 inc VAT) from printerland.co.uk
The Oki’s big selling point is its advanced smart features, beginning with a huge 17.5cm colour touchscreen and going on to cover a range of management and security features – including its Private Print pull-print option - and firmware you can extend with a range of first and third-party apps. Certain features will mean more to larger enterprises than small businesses, but with document management and printer administration tools thrown in, they might be tempting to firms looking to install a small fleet.
Such companies might have full-time IT staff, in which case
configuring the C542dn won’t be an issue. If not, the manual configuration process needed to get the printer connected to the Ethernet network could be a barrier, as could simply finding the correct software on Oki’s website. At least the large touchscreen and logical menus take some of the pain away. As standard, the C542dn is USB and Ethernet only, but there is an optional 802.11n Wi-Fi module.
Once you have it up and running, the Oki demonstrates other strengths. First, it’s speedy, dishing out monochrome pages at a rate of 22ppm and colour pages at 12.8ppm. Even printing duplex – the mode it’s set to print in by default – it keeps up the pace at 14ppm. It proved just as competitive when printing a full-page photomontage, delivering our test page in just 48 seconds, ahead of any other model on test.
However, the actual quality of the photos isn’t quite so dazzling, with poor colour reproduction and blotchy areas; even business graphics have a slightly grainy look. That said, if your main focus is black text, the Oki is one of the best printers on test, with dark, sharply defined edges and letters that almost stand out from the page.
This is a big, bulky business printer, albeit with a lower profile than the monster office lasers of old. On the plus side, it has plenty of capacity, with a 250-sheet cassette and a 100-sheet secondary input tray, as well as room for 150 sheets of print emerging from the top. Print costs are also competitive, at 1.3p per mono print and 8p per colour page.
It’s the most expensive printer here, but if you take advantage of its features, the C542dn is worth it.