Oki MC363dn
Ugly as sin it may be, but Oki’s MC363dn offers a lot for the money
SCORE PRICE £217 (£260 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/287oki
Oki’s MC363dn looks like it’s fallen through a wormhole from the 1990s: big, heavy and unapologetically strewn with buttons. While it misses out on snazzy touchscreen controls, however, its specifications are impressive for this price. There’s a fax modem, duplex, scans and copies, a front panel USB port for walk-up prints and scans, and a Gigabit Ethernet connection at the back. The only significant omission is wireless networking – this adds around £70 to the price.
This MFP’s looks aren’t the only reason you wouldn’t want to share a small office with it: it’s particularly noisy, clattering away whether printing or scanning, and spinning up its shouty cooling fans momentarily even when simply scanning from the platen. It’s not especially intuitive to use compared to touchscreen rivals, and, according to our measurements, its power saving mode didn’t actually save any power.
Whinging aside, this is a very capable and quick MFP for the money. While it took around 37 seconds to warm up and deliver a first page, or 17 seconds from standby, it went on to deliver text at 20.8ppm and colour graphics at 16.6ppm. Scans were extremely fast, ranging from six seconds for a preview up to just 21 seconds for a 1,200dpi photo, and photocopies shot out at 34 seconds for ten black pages, or 38 seconds in colour. With a single-pass duplex scanner, double-sided copying is fast and fuss-free.
While black text quality was superb, our other results were less impressive. At the default setting, graphics, photos and photocopies had a dark, under-saturated look. Switching to the Office Colour profile improved the former two, but they still weren’t entirely to our tastes. On the plus side, Oki’s toner produced a lovely gloss finish across text and mid-to-dark graphics. Scans were good enough for most office uses, but the driver’s Auto Adjust feature proved inconsistent, sometimes returning images with a warm brown colour bias.
The MC363dn doesn’t produce the best results, but it’s good value, and no more expensive to run than the other colour lasers in this test. It’s far better than it looks, but it wouldn’t be our top choice.