Product Reviews

Oki's new C710n is an A4 colour laser printer that's aimed at the speed-hungry business printing market. It's rated at an impressive 30 pages per minute for colour and 32 for black and white, which would make it a superb workgroup device.

Actually, the C710n is better described as a 'laser-class' printer rather than an actual laser printer. This is because, technically, this is an LED printer rather than a laser-driven device, in that the imaging of printable areas on the page is done with a fine array of LEDs rather than a scanning laser. However, that makes no practical difference to its output quality nor speed. What does make a difference is that it's a single-pass device: the four toner cartridges are arranged in a single series so that the paper only has to pass through the imaging part of the device once, rather than once per colour as in four-pass designs. This is becoming increasingly common, albeit at the higher end of the colour laser (and LED) printer market.

The printer has a 10/100Base-T Ethernet port, a USB 2 port and, purely for the Windows market, a parallel port. The lack of gigabit Ethernet wasn't a problem in our speed tests, as it seems that processing speed is still one of the most important factors in printing performance. It comes with 256MB of Ram as standard, which is expansible to 768MB, and the PostScript 3 clone engine processed positively chewed through our test jobs without pause. Furthermore, it's rated for a very high 100,000 pages per month, so Oki has designed it to be used mercilessly.

The standard printing resolutions are 600 x 600dpi, 1200 x 600dpi (the LED array is fixed at 600dpi, but the page imaging process is stepped 1200 times an inch), and Oki's ProQ2400 'Multi-level technology', which is a resolution-enhancement printing method that's

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meant to improve the apparent resolution of the output - line art and text in particular.

From an office point of view, it's just the kind of reliable workhorse that people like to have available. It holds a decent amount of paper even with its standard tray: 530 sheets of basic 80gsm paper. It's more like 420 sheets of 100gsm presentation-quality stock, but that's still a decent quantity.

We tested this with a variety of jobs, including printing some high-resolution (200MB+) Photoshop images, print-quality PDFs and DTP layouts, as well as some more mundane word processing tasks. It managed all the jobs in very good time, taking less than a minute (54 seconds to be precise) from clicking on the Print button to getting the paper out with our very large Photoshop images, and 30 seconds to deliver 10 duplicates of a word processed page. The engine is rated faster than this, but we measure the total elapsed time it takes to get the job back, including data transmission and processing time. If we'd measured just the page imaging throughput speed, it would have scored even better.

So far, so technically good. This product is clearly a great general-purpose office colour laser printer. But how does it do when printing design-critical rather than just time-critical work?

The built-in demo page and the sample sheets included with the printer all look highly impressive. When looking at our own test documents, the results were generally good, but they showed that this printer has a slight general weakness with greens and with shadow detail. Green elements in photos and graphics were reproduced with a little less saturation or vibrancy than we expected, even allowing for the differences between screen and CMYK print.

It wasn't specifically bad, but we've certainly seen better greens from a colour laser before now. Shadow detail was flattened and filled in somewhat compared with the original images. Once again, not to a dramatic level, but still enough to turn the subtle contours of a deeply shadowed face into a darker, flatter area.

To be fair, these tests pushed this printer into areas for which it wasn't designed. In its home ground of business graphics and with more run-of-the-mill DTP layout jobs, this printer can shine. However, do think about your needs. The Oki C710n is robust and very fast, but there are more accurate colour lasers out there.