Product Reviews

Oki's C3600n A4 colour printer is an impressively compact, desk-friendly device. This is an LED printer, to be technically precise, a variation on the laser-based printing engine, and it's billed as a fast printer for solo users or small workgroups.

The C3600n contains a PostScript 3 Rip, connects across a network by Ethernet or directly by USB, is rated as printing 16 pages per minute (ppm) in colour and 20ppm in mono, and handles paper weights from 80gsm up to about 200gsm. This strays into the lightweight card territory, which is a little heavier medium than the average laser printer can cope with.

The physical design of this printer is about as boxy as it can get, which is a good thing when it comes to printers, as it helps them fit into spaces with less disruption. The printer's slide-out paper tray is entirely contained within the base and even access to the toner units is through the flip-top lid, all accessible from the front. The toner cartridges are arranged in a line so the paper is imaged with all four colours in a single pass. This should mean that colour printing runs as fast as mono, and while there's a slight speed discrepancy in the Oki statistics it isn't particularly large.

Real-world printing speeds involve more than just the printer engine, of course. While simpler pages didn't hang around, we found that printing to the Oki C3600n was actually a rather slow experience with bigger documents. With layouts containing large images, it took minutes per page for the driver to transfer from the Mac to the printer. If we stepped down the quality to basic 600 x 600dpi output, the time decreased somewhat, with not too much of a drop in apparent resolution, but this wasn't the default.

Once the data made it to the device, the printer engine pushed the pages out at a generally consistent speed. We found that it managed to reach

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about 16ppm in our simple black text page test. This is slower than the stated mono page, but a reasonable pace for most uses.

Colour reproduction was pretty good in our tests, although it should be noted that, like all laser and LED printers, this isn't in the imaging class of photo-quality inkjet printers. This approached the look of basic magazine colour printing, although the halftone screen it used was coarser. The print engine runs at 1200 x 600dpi, meaning it has a 600dpi horizontal imaging unit that can be stepped at 1200 increments per inch. With Oki's ProQ2400 interpolation and dot-placement enhancement, offered as an option in the printer driver, this is boosted to an effective 2400dpi. However, while this is useful, it's worth remembering that this doesn't equal the output of a true 2400dpi engine. Text and line art output benefits, but halftones get limited help from this.

The printer driver provides a large amount of control, rather more than we're used to seeing in a printer of this type, and we found that it was fairly well presented. Although we didn't test this feature, it's supposed to be able to print documents up to 1.2m long. When printing at the highest-quality level to this media size, Oki recommends a Ram upgrade for the printer, adding at least 64MB to its built-in 128MB. We didn't notice memory problems in our tests, although it's likely to have affected performance.

Power consumption was a little more than we initially expected, although it isn't unusual for colour laser-class printers. When in use, it averages about 400-500W and can peak at around double that. When idling, it consumes 100W - as much as a bright lightbulb - but it does drop to under 14W when in power-saving mode. Looking at the bigger picture, the power consumption isn't that much, but it's more than an equivalent mono laser printer. You may want to tweak the power-save timeout settings to cut in sooner.

We've seen faster printers, but never at this price point. It does run more slowly than we'd like when presented with larger jobs, but in all our tests it went ahead and processed them rather than giving up. As a printer for a small workgroup, provided you don't have frequent urgent needs for complex jobs in a hurry, this is a good budget-friendly choice. And the ability to plug a PostScript colour laser printer (okay LED printer) into your network for £350 - or less than £300 if you shop around - is worth remembering.