Labs

The Oki B2400 is about the smallest laser printer we've ever seen. Well, strictly speaking it's not a laser printer at all. Oki uses an LED printing system, which draws less power than a real laser, so the B2400 saves space on your desk and also shrinks your carbon footprint a bit.

Predictably, this tiny unit doesn't have a huge range of features. You'll find nothing here beyond the absolute printing basics, and the paper feed - more like an inkjet hopper than a conventional laser tray - only holds 150 sheets at a time. The B2400's compactness is itself a selling point, of

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course, and another one is that Oki generously include an onsite warranty, so if it breaks down, they'll come to you to fix it. That's a big improvement on waiting for it to be picked up, carted off somewhere and brought back later.

In our speed tests the Oki finished just a whisker off last place, taking two minutes and 51 seconds to print a 50 page document (for comparison, the Lexmark did it in one minute and 56 seconds). Don't get too hung up on that, though: it's still an average rate of 17 pages per minute, so you won't be waiting around for prints unless you make a habit of printing long documents.

Quality isn't a strong point either, though. Greyscale images suffered from uneven stripes, which made our pages look cheap. Text was clear and crisp, but compared to the rival lasers the Oki's output looked somehow lightweight and lacking in solidity.

The B2400 isn't all that expensive to buy, and at 1.47p per page it's one of the cheapest of these printers to run. But it's a real no-frills device, which doesn't excel in any area except smallness. You might well consider it if desk space is at a premium, but don't expect to be bowled over.