Colour laser printer prices have dropped dramatically over the last couple of years, and you can now get a very serviceable machine, like Oki's C3100, for under £500 at street prices. This is a printer designed for a small office or an individual needing relatively high-volume colour prints. It's a lot more economical to run than an equivalent colour inkjet.

There are two things unusual about the C3100. Firstly, it uses an in-line engine. This means that, rather than having a 'carousel' with the four colour toner cartridges mounted in it and rotating them to lay each colour in turn onto a single photosensitive drum, this machine uses a photosensitive belt and lays colour from separate hoppers in a single pass. The technique should be quicker than a carousel and is unusual in a colour printer at this price point.

Secondly, like all Oki laser printers, it's actually an LED printer. Oki uses a strip of high-intensity LEDs in place of a laser beam to write each page. This sometimes puts a limit on the top resolution of the printer (though here it's a healthy 1,200dpi), but the LED strip takes up a lot less room than a laser engine.

Controls on the printer are simple, with buttons to turn it on and offline and to cancel a print job. There are also four indicators for power, paper out, low toner and paper jam. The paper comes from a 300-sheet built-in paper tray under the printer, and there's also a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray which folds down and slides out from the front of the machine. At the rear is a single USB 2 socket - there's no parallel or network connection on the C3100.

The Windows driver is pretty complete and includes functions to print watermarks and to control colour, though there is no direct adherence to any colour standards.

Printed output is generally pretty good. Black text is clear and sharp with very little toner spray along the edges. Colour graphics are also well reproduced, with little banding in areas of fill. We noticed slight mis-registration of black text over coloured backgrounds, so that white fringing appeared in places. It's possible to get round this by specifying a solid black overprint, but you have to remember to set the option in the printer driver.

Print costs are low for this category of colour printer, with a five percent black page coming out at 1.75p and a 20 percent colour one costing 5.2p.

Verdict
This is a well-designed and economical colour LED printer, ideal for general-purpose colour print work in a small workgroup. Running costs are relatively low, print speeds are reasonable and printed output, even of photos - not a speciality of this type of printer - is acceptable for most purposes.

Company: Oki

Contact: 0800 917 6015

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