Product Reviews

Oki's B2540 MFP costs a little more than you'd pay for an entry-level mono laser network printer, but it's a multifunction peripheral that can also scan in colour or make black-and-white copies. As if that wasn't enough, it has an Ethernet port for connection to a home or office network, and it can send and receive faxes without needing a connection to a PC.

It may sound like a winning combination for the money, but our disappointment with the B2540 started almost as soon as we'd removed it from its box. There's a quick setup guide to help you through some simple preparation, such as inserting the print consumable, but it's hidden away in a bag. Inserting the setup disc brought up a choice of software to install, but it wasn't clear which

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packages were necessary to get up and running. We had to install the Companion Suite Pro LL software and run a wizard contained within its program group to install the network print drivers.

You can't use the B2540 MFP to send scans over the network, but there's a USB port on its front panel that lets you scan directly to, or print from, an inserted storage device. For our scan tests, we connected our PC to the B2540's rear USB port. Preview and low-resolution scans were pretty quick, but scanning at 300dpi or above was slow. All the images we captured seemed softly focused, and we could see digital noise in their dark areas.

At its rated 16 pages per minute (ppm) , the Oki would be reasonably slow for a laser printer, but it struggled to reach even this in our tests, which we conducted over a network connection. The fastest result was on our formal letter test, where 50 pages of crisp text arrived in three minutes and 19 seconds. We were less than impressed with the quality of graphics, which were grainy and particularly slow. Although the automatic document feeder (ADF) makes multiple-page photocopies easy, the default settings produced dark results.

The B2540 is well priced but comparatively expensive to run, and not very good at printing or scanning. At least it managed clear, well exposed faxes.