Oki B4300

While Oki's colour 'laser' (actually LED) printers catch all the headlines, the company enjoys considerable success with personal but expandable mono products too.

The B4000 series picks up where the old Okipage 14 left off, with the B4300 model offering more expansion and plenty of built-in paper handling versatility.

Unlike most personal mono A4 lasers, the B4300 provides an on-printer menu system and LCD status window for configuration independently of your PC.

Its official print speed of 18ppm is out of the ordinary too in this league, and our tests reveal this isn't far off real-world performance.

We printed 20 copies of a Word document in one minute, eight seconds, with the first sheet dropping into the output tray within just seven seconds. A full-A4 high-resolution photo image took a mere 21 seconds.

Greyscale and general halftone images like this suffer from an obvious dither, but text and line art graphics are superbly crisp.

The star feature of the B4300, though, is paper handling. In addition to the slide-in 250-sheet cassette complete with paper level indicator at the front, there's a manual feeder tray and a flip-open output tray at the back if you prefer your printouts face-up rather than face-down on top of the unit as usual.

A further cassette and a multifeeder can be added at extra cost. That's not bad for a personal printer, especially since you can choose to upgrade it with a network interface to turn it into a workgroup machine.

Those all-important optional extras such as network interface and second paper tray are set at fairly reasonable prices, so there's no hidden cost here. You can buy cheaper personal mono lasers than this, but the B4300 is faster and much better featured.

Contact: Oki Europe 020 8219 2190
www.okieurope.com

Specifications:

• Digital LED technology
• 250-sheet input cassette, single-sheet MP tray
• 18ppm quoted speed
• 600 x 1,200dpi resolution
• Single cartridge
• 16MB memory
• USB2, parallel connections
• 9kg
• 355 x 395 x 200mm (w x d x h)
• Toner cartridges: £21 standard, £42 high capacity
• Image drum life: 25,000 sheets
• Image drum price: £105

See also:

Lexmark E323n

Network laser printing at an affordable price.  14 Jul 2003

Minolta-QMS Magicolor

Very affordable colour laser with good print quality  20 May 2003

HP Laserjet 1005W

A personal laser printer that offers high speed and low consumable costs.  29 Apr 2003

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