OkiPage 8cen

Quality at such a high speed is never going to match the sort of output you can get from the slower, higher-resolution inkjets, but it's good enough for most business documents and it remains the same whatever paper stock you use. Text quality was, as you'd expect from a 600dpi laser printer, crisp and sharp-edged down to the smallest font sizes. Colour fades were smooth with virtually no stepping, and detail on complex graphics was captured admirably. Colours were a little on the dull side, however, as our Pantone spot colour test revealed, and photographic images with large areas of one colour showed banding similar to that demonstrated by the 1200n last month.

Overall, the OkiPage 8cen is a fine solution for workgroup colour printing, offering a colour print speed that's only rivalled by Lexmark's far more expensive 1200n. Despite some doubts over print quality, especially when dealing with photographic images, the price of £2,935 including Ethernet card and Adobe PostScript Level 3 is very reasonable.

Author: Jonathan Bray