Product Reviews

Small companies that are purchasing their first workgroup laser must surely find it more than a little annoying when they see the same manufacturer pulling a faster, cheaper and better-specified model out of the bag within a matter of months. It's something that's happening at an increasing rate across the industry, and the laser printer market is no exception. Just six months after introducing 10i/n (reviewed issue 47, p152), Oki has launched the 12i/n.

As the name suggests, print speed has been boosted by an extra couple of pages per minute. But beyond this obvious improvement, memory has been increased by 2Mb and you now get Adobe PostScript 2 as standard (adding the latter to the 10i/n would have cost an extra £140). At the heart of the whole shebang is a faster 40MHz MIPS 3000 processor.

That's where the differences end, however. The maximum resolution remains static, with 600dpi for text-based printing and 600 « 1,200dpi for graphics. Just like the 10i/n, the 12i/n also comes fully networked. It features an OkiLAN Ethernet print server card which boasts twin on-board SIMM sockets, one used for installing font SIMMs and the other for an industry-standard 72-pin SIMM module. Oki's memory prices have traditionally been hard to swallow but, at last, it has seen the light and dropped prices to a more acceptable £60 for an 8Mb upgrade.

In keeping with other Oki printers, the 12i/n favours LED over laser printing technology. The company views this as a more stable method of creating an image on the print drum because it requires fewer moving parts than the more common laser technique. In fact, it's so confident it guarantees the LED print head for five years.

Cosmetically, the 12i/n looks identical to the 10i/n as well. It retains the same compact chassis which can handle 250 sheets of A4 paper in its standard paper tray. This is supplemented by a multipurpose tray located at the front of the printer for loading single sheets of heavier media or attaching the optional 50-envelope feeder unit; total capacity can be increased by a further 500 sheets with an optional second base unit.

Considering the 12i/n's target market, it's surprising

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to find that toner cartridges have a lifespan of just 2,000 pages apiece. The other main consumable is the image drum and its durability depends heavily on the length of print jobs. At 15 pages per print job it will last for 20,000 pages, but this drops to just 9,000 pages for single-page jobs. With printing costs ranging from 1.5p to an uncomfortable 2.5p per page, it's well worth analysing your workgroup's printing habits before spending any money.

Installing the 12i/n on a network is fairly straightforward, although it isn't as intuitive as Hewlett-Packard's JetAdmin utility. I tested it on a NetWare 4.11 network serviced by a Fujitsu Pentium Pro 200 server. Unfortunately, the process wasn't completely glitch-free, but after a few attempts I did manage to get the supplied OkiView utility to search the network for any OkiLAN print server cards and display them ready for configuration. A criticism levelled at the OkiPage 10i/n was the lack of support for NDS (Novell Directory Services) in queue server mode - an oversight that has now been remedied. The printer's embedded Web server makes it even easier to manage most of the printers features using a basic Web browser.

When it came to the performance tests, the 12i/n's hardware improvements made their presence felt immediately. The printer easily hit the quoted print speed, producing a 15-page text-only document in just 78 seconds for 11.5ppm. More complex documents, however, saw a sharp drop in speed. The 24-page PC Pro mono laser test combining heavily formatted text, graphics and charts was output at 6.5ppm. And with resolution increased to maximum, print speed dropped further to just 4ppm. However, this was substantially better than the 10i/n which, even at 600dpi, couldn't do better than 4ppm and only touched 5ppm with an additional 4Mb of memory installed.

Text quality was easily up to scratch at 600dpi, but graphics still suffered from an unsightly horizontal and vertical banding, a common affliction with LED printers. Lexmark's super-fast OptraColor 1200n (reviewed issue 49, p160), which uses the same technique, exhibited the identical problem. Of more concern, however, was the fact that full-page photographic images using the PostScript driver at 1,200dpi failed as a result of memory overruns.

Although prices for workgroup-level mono lasers have dropped substantially over the past few months, the OkiPage 12i/n still represents very good value. A comparison with similar models in the PC Pro mono laser Labs (issue 49) shows that no other manufacturers can deliver a printer with network and PostScript 2 emulation as standard for such a low price. But this great value for money is tempered by the fact that graphics quality is below par and printing costs can be very high.