Product Reviews

Oki scored a notable success in the last PC Pro mono laser Labs (issue 37, p141) when the OkiPage 16n scooped both Value and Quality awards. The rather unimaginatively named OkiPage 10i/n is the latest addition to the range and, no doubt, Oki hopes it will carry on in the same successful vein as its bigger brother.

Aimed at small to medium-sized workgroups, the 10i/n offers 10ppm print speed, true 600 x 600dpi resolution, the latest HP PCL6 emulation, and uses an LED array instead of laser technology to reproduce a page image on the print drum. The OkiPage 10i/n on review here also comes with an OkiLAN 310e network print server card already fitted, although you can buy one without. In fact, it's quite unusual to see printers that have less than 12ppm print speeds with this as an option. Kyocera recently moved in with its 8ppm network-ready FS-800 (reviewed issue 46, p158), but apart from this there's no direct competition. Clearly, the gradual move by smaller workgroups from peer-to-peer networks to a client/server environment has not gone unnoticed by these printer manufacturers.

The 10i/n is a compact unit measuring only 330 x 376 x 200mm, so it's ideally suited to cramped office environments. A large control panel with a two-line LCD window extends across the back of the 150-sheet top output bin, with eight buttons for accessing the menu system. It's a little over complex, however, and the brief documentation doesn't help matters.

A lower tray handles 250 sheets of A4 paper, while the flip-down multipurpose tray at the front can be used for feeding single sheets of heavier media. The printer's capacity can be increased by adding a second 500-sheet tray (£320) underneath, and you can add an optional multipurpose feeder as well (£159), which has room for a further 100 sheets or 50 envelopes.

At its heart, the 10i/n is driven by a MIPS R3000 28MHz processor and comes with only 2Mb of memory. To upgrade the memory on the basic OkiPage 10i you'll need a special expansion card (£45) that fits into a slot at the rear, but on the 10i/n it's not a problem since the network card sports a pair of SIMM sockets.

As expected, testing revealed that the standard complement of 2Mb wasn't quite enough, and I ended up having to fit an extra 4Mb to stop memory overruns when printing photographic images. Text was no problem, however, and print speeds were easily up to Oki's claims, with a 15-page Word document taking 92 seconds. More complex documents will take their toll as our 24-page printer test - which includes copious graphics, multiple fonts and embedded charts - dropped the speed down to only 4ppm. With the extra 4Mb this improved to a touch over 5ppm.

Text quality was up to scratch with pin-sharp characters, but graphics were a different story, suffering from unsightly horizontal and vertical banding. The OkiPage can print at a simulated 1,200 « 600dpi, but I could see little difference between this and the lower resolution for graphics.

Printing costs are pretty high, particularly if you run single-page prints, as the image drum (£145) only lasts for 10,000 sheets. At three pages per print job this improves to 16,000 sheets, but even taking into account this best case scenario the total comes to an uncomfortable minimum of 1.75p per page when you factor in the cost of toner cartridges.

Installing the printer on a NetWare 4.11 network proved pleasantly simple, helped along immensely by the bundled OkiView network utility. It scans the network on loading and displays any OkiLAN print server cards detected that are ready for configuration. A surprising feature is that the card has its own internal HTTP server allowing it to be accessed and configured using a Web browser over TCP/IP.

The only criticism I would level at the network setup is that it doesn't support NDS (Novell directory services) in queue server mode. NDS is the most important management feature of NetWare that Microsoft has always envied. It has been a standard part of Novell's NOS (network operating system) for nearly four years now and it's unacceptable for network printers not to fully support it.

Apart from this there's nothing much wrong with the OkiPage 10i/n, and at £645 for the network-ready model, it's considerably cheaper than its only competitor, the Kyocera FS-800. The latter does come with PostScript 2 as standard but it's slower and the network option makes it £124 more expensive. The Kyocera's graphics quality is better, but if you want a cheap network printer for mainly text-based tasks then the OkiPage 10i/n is a good buy.