OkiPage 8cen

In the past two years, developments in technology have driven the demand for super-high-quality inkjet printers to unprecedented levels. For some time now, manufacturers have been falling over themselves to produce the next latest and greatest printer, but this hasn't been the case with the colour laser market. Demand for colour in the workplace, driven by the rise of the inkjet, has brought about attempts from HP and Lexmark to move inkjet into a more demanding environment, but the HP 2000C (reviewed issue 49, p158) and Lexmark's OptraColor 45n (reviewed issue 48, p158) failed to impress.

Finally, it seems things are beginning to pick up in the colour laser market, with some recent announcements from big manufacturers coupled with the launch of Lexmark's new 1200n 12ppm colour LED-based printer (reviewed issue 49, p160) and now the OkiPage 8cen. The latter is, in fact, based on the same technology as the 1200n but, instead of offering 12ppm and A3 printing, aims a bit lower at general office work with an 8ppm print speed and up to letter or legal size paper handling.

To look at, the 8cen isn't particularly noteworthy: a plain-looking printer in standard-issue beige livery, with an LCD for status messages and configuration mounted on the top lip. There's a manual paper feed tray just below it for up to 100 sheets or ten envelopes, as well as the main 500-sheet tray at the bottom. Another 500-sheet tray can be added to boost the total capacity to 1,100.

Under the side panel sits the processing heart of the 8cen, a 100MHz MIPS R4700 CPU backed up with 16Mb of RAM. Two free SIMM slots allow this to be upgraded to 80Mb using standard SIMMs, and another pair of filled slots indicate the presence of Adobe PostScript 3. It's a fairly impressive specification, but you'll need to upgrade the RAM if you plan to print lots of complex jobs, as I experienced some memory overruns. The 8cen also comes complete with the same Ethernet card as featured in the OkiPage 20N, which offers Novell NDS support as well as printing over TCP/IP. Oki's OkiView software deals with network setup and lets you create and assign queues under NDS.

Opening the top of the printer reveals four LED 'heads' protruding from the underside of the lid and four toner/image drum units arranged in series inside. The fact that each colour has its own image drum and LED head explains why this printing system can go faster than most standard colour lasers. Most colour lasers apply each colour in turn and so can only print colour at a quarter of the speed they produce mono prints. The OkiPage 8cen, like the Lexmark 1200n before it, can print all four colours simultaneously, which means colour prints should come out at the same speed as monochrome.

On the downside, this means the number of consumables is large enough to make your average IT manager wince. There are four toner bottles which last for 1,800 pages each, four image drums, an oil and waste toner kit, transfer belt, oil roller and fuser unit (see above for prices). Surprisingly, though, this all works out to give a very competitive cost per colour page of 6.5p excluding paper - even cheaper than the 1200n - and a slightly more expensive than average cost per mono page of 2.5p.

So it looks fine in principle, but does it live up to its promise? In speed terms, the 8cen got close but wasn't quite there. It managed to rattle out 20 pages consisting mainly of text with a few colour charts in two minutes and 59 seconds at a rate of 7.4ppm after taking 39 seconds to print the first page. You might also want to print multiple copies of complex jobs to save you time. I tested with five copies of a PCD image printed at full A4 size and, although it took two minutes and 45 seconds for the first page to appear, the other four copies were dumped into the output tray a mere 30 seconds later, giving a speed of 8ppm. A more demanding 23-page Word document with plenty of in-line images, graphs and fonts slowed things down, printing in eight minutes and 32 seconds for a speed of just under 3ppm.