Oki C332dn
A functional printer that’s great for occasional use, turning out fast, sharp prints at an amazing price
SCORE
PRICE £94 exc VAT from okidirect.co.uk
If you’re looking for a budgetpriced A4 colour laser printer, avert your gaze no more: you won’t find one for less than Oki’s C332dn. Costing a mere £94, this network-ready desktop model offers respectable mono and colour print speeds of 30ppm and 26ppm, a more than ample 1GB of memory and even an internal duplex unit.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t a laser, but an LED printer. The technology is very similar, but one difference here is that the paper follows a flat path past the print mechanism. This means the C332dn can handle heavyweight 220gsm stationery via the multipurpose tray at the front – and a rear paper slot allows you to print banners up to 1.3m long.
Despite the price, the C332dn is clearly designed for a middleweight office role, with a standard 250-sheet paper tray that can be supplemented with a second lower 530-sheet tray. There’s Gigabit Ethernet as standard, and if you need wireless then Oki offers an optional 802.11n Wi-FI module that costs £31 and snaps in behind a small panel at the side.
While the C332dn’s asking price is extremely low, that’s offset by steep running costs. Oki’s high-yield colour toner cartridges each cost as much as the printer itself, and once you factor in the individual drums, belt and fuser, you’re looking at an overall cost of 2p per mono page and 11.4p for colour. Depending on how you use it, when the bundled 1,000-page starter cartridges run out, you might actually be better off buying a whole new printer, rather than paying for those pricey cartridges.
The printer is easy to install, with most functions accessible via its basic web interface – although, slightly irritatingly, AirPrint and Google Cloud Print must be configured from the printer’s two-line LCD panel. Still, you only have to do this once, and we then had no problems printing via the cloud or directly over AirPrint.
After installing Oki’s drivers on our Windows 10 desktops, we dipped into the supplied toolbox of desktop utilities; these include a clever remote configuration manager, which lets you upload custom forms and fonts to the printer’s onboard flash memory. You won’t find much in the way of access control tools, but Oki’s free PrintSuperVision (sPSV) web server takes care of that. After installing this
“You won’t have to wait around for documents, thanks to a time-to-firstpage of under ten seconds from a ready state”
on a Windows Server 2012 R2 system, we were able to review the print log and restrict colour printing by user, application, hostname and document name.
Speed-wise, the C332dn lives up to its manufacturer’s claims: our 30-page mono Word document completed in 60 seconds at all driver resolutions, and duplexed at 16.5ppm. Our complex 24-page colour DTP document came out only slightly more slowly, at 27ppm – even at the top ProQ interpolated 2,400dpi resolution. You won’t have to wait around for shorter documents, thanks to a time-to-first-page of under ten seconds from a ready state. It’s not too noisy either: we recorded tolerable peak sound levels of 63dB at a distance of 1m.
Output quality is more than good enough for general office printing, with pin-sharp text even at tiny sizes. Mono photos look good too, with a nice neutral tone, although a lack of detail in darker areas left them looking a tad murky. Colour photos and reports benefit from good contrast and detail, while the driver’s Photo Enhance setting makes visible improvements by increasing sharpness and contrast.
Our only real issue with output quality is that large areas of single colours exhibit a slight cross-hatching effect – something we’ve come to associate with low-cost LED printers.
For the price, the C332dn has a heck of a lot to offer. Its high running costs mean it’s not the right choice if you need to do a lot of colour printing, but for the odd page here and there it’s a fast, high-quality option.
SPECIFICATIONS 600dpi colour A4 LED 26/30ppm colour/ mono 667MHz CPU 1GB RAM Gigabit Ethernet USB 2 250-sheet input tray 100-sheet MPT rec monthly duty cycle, 3,000 pages 410 x 504 x 242mm WDH 22kg 3yr on-site warranty (on registration). Options: 802.11n wireless module, £31 530-sheet lower tray, £184 (all exc VAT) RUNNING COSTS High-yield toner: K (3.5K), £46; C, Y, M (3K), £94 each image drum (30K max), £97 fuser (60K), £54 transfer belt (60K), £53. Overall cost per A4 page: mono, 2p; colour, 11.4p