Okidata C5200N LED Color Printer Review

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(More customer reviews)One motivation for writing this review is some important misinformation in a previous review. At any rate, I could not decide between the OKI 5200 and the HP 2600. At my local office supply store, they sat side-by-side, and thanks to two different $100 rebate offers (one instant, one mail-in) for the OKI, they were the exact same price. My decades-long favorable experiences with everything HP I had purchased (including a mono laser printer) had me strongly leaning toward the HP. The sample test prints made by each showed them very close in quality, with the HP doing a slightly better job at printing graphics. A big difference is that the OKI's prints are high gloss. Even the lettering is gloss, when printing no graphics, on plain white paper. So imagine every letter you print with the OKI having glossy black type regardless of what paper you use. If that's something you like, the OKI will not disappoint. For normal use, I personally find it a bit strange. It so happens that I was buying the OKI primarily for the printing of color brochures, and the glossy output was perfect for that. So I went with the OKI against my better judgement, but in love with the glossy prints.
I really don't know whether I made the right decision, all things considered, because I don't have the HP 2600 to compare against. The OKI has an enormous footprint making it difficult to find a place to park it. It also weighs 50+ pounds. The HP has a great and stylistic design that allows a MUCH smaller footprint. Something to keep in mind before you purchase, as it's a problem for me now. I am going to obtain a separate low cart and place the OKI on that.
The various toner cartidges inside the OKI are horizontally arranged. Lifting the long cover to its full height (requiring a lot of free space to do so), one then reaches over the long bank of toner cartridges to access the rearmost colors. The HP 2600, on the other hand, has an extremely easy access design, with all the cartridges available at the FRONT of the printer, in vertical array.
The OKI does produce oustanding text (with the warning that it is high gloss and there's nothing you can do about it) that is crisp and clean down to small font sizes. Printing photos is another story. Relative to other color laser printers in this price range, small photos (which I use a lot of for brochure printing) print about average. However, the OKI photo printing would not even match a cheap inkjet printer from five years ago. There are several color printing tweaks available, and I found that using the OKI's sRGB color space worked a bit better than the other settings. Color lasers have a long way to go when it comes to quality photo printing. They key is to keep the photos small, somewhere under 3" x 3" .
The OKI build construction is good. Preparing for first-time use requires about 25 minutes of removing tapes, straps, and shipping blocks located all over, under and inside the unit. Be certain to keep the cartridges level in your hands whilst you're removing all the protective tapes from it. I managed to spill some cyan toner on my pants. Driver installation went perfectly, in contrast to some aggravating hacking I've had to do when installing HP laser printer drivers.
The OKI fired up properly (if noisily) the very first time, and the intitial test page was perfect. While the print speed is quite good, the warmup time is not. The HP will get you prints from a cold start much quicker -- but the printing speed is slow.
Documentation includes a handy and useful booklet that attaches to the side of the printer. The manual itself is lacking in detail. The setup guide was ambiguous and not very helpful.
The built-in Ethernet card is a nice addition, but also found on other color lasers in this price range. Setup for this part is intimidating and not for the faint of heart.
I use 65 pound stock for the brochures I print, which means I have to use the Multi Purpose Tray to load the sheets, and flip open a rear paper stacker so that the stock shoots straight through the printer and out the back. Recall that the printer footprint is already deep, and now I have to allow another foot of room for the sheets to feed out the back. Further, the Multi Purpose Tray is very kludgy to use.
Now for the sobering aspect of OKI ownership (and other color lasers as well). There is bad news, and worse news. Bad -- it costs more to purchase a new set of toner cartridges than it cost to purchase a new OKI. The high capacity (5k pages, NOT 50k as mentioned in a previous review) toner cartridges for this printer are $62 for black and $142.50 for the other colors. If you purchase the rainbow pack (all colors at once) you save 10% and pay a mere $440.15. Folks, I paid $400 for this printer brand new after mail-in rebate. Things get worse, as the OKI uses separate drums, one for each color also, and they cost $100 each as well. When you change a drum, OKI recommends you change the cartridge. OKI claims the drums are good for 50k pages. When you thought things couldn't get worse -- well, they do. OKI, unlike HP, is one of those companies that provides only a starter set of toner cartridges (rated at 3k pages). The ugly fact is that once you fork out the dollars for OKI 2600, in only 3k pages you'll be facing the peculiar decision of forking out $440.15 for new cartridges, or buying a new color laser for LESS. By 50k pages, you'll be needing some $845 to buy new drums and cartridges. Better start scouting out a convenient dumpster in which to unload your 50-pound hunk of plastic.
The bottom line for me is that the OKI produces some great glossy brochures that just pop with crisp color. Unfortunately, it is not easy to print these brochures due to the kludgy Multi Purpose Tray. For other uses, especially if you're not seeking the glossy look for everything you print, you may want to check out the competition. I'm personally not looking forward to another major financial outlay at 3k pages, as detailed above.

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