Printer Review: Oki C610dtn

What weighed 135 pounds and came with its very own pallet? Why, the total package containing the Oki C610dtn color LED printer and assorted accessories that landed on our doorstep for this review.

Fortunately for us, out of its elaborate packaging, the Oki printer weighs in at a far more manageable though still substantial 57.3 pounds. And at 17.1 x 21.5 x 13.4 inches, the Oki C610's dimensions are (to our great relief) far smaller than the box it came in. In fact, while this workhorse of a printer -- rated for a duty cycle of up to 75,000 pages per month -- isn't exactly made for your average desktop, it's compact, sleek and handsome enough to be a fairly unobtrusive addition to any small business or department that places fast and reasonably priced color printing at a premium.

Functionally a match for a color laser printer -- Okidata's design has an LED instead of laser light source under the hood -- the C610 comes in four variations: the C610n (list $700), C610dn ($840), C610cdn ($940) and our test unit, the C610dtn ($1,030).

Each model sports the same basic specs and internals including Ethernet and USB 2.0 connectivity. Oki rates all four for up to 1,200 by 600 dpi print resolution at speeds of 32 pages per minute for color and 34 ppm for black-and-white printing. Each is powered by a 533MHz PowerPC CPU with 256MB (upgradeable to 768MB) of memory.

Each has a 300-sheet legal/letter-sized paper tray on the bottom and 100-sheet multipurpose tray on the front for materials such as envelopes, transparencies, and mailing label stock. All save the C610n base model come with a duplex (two-sided) printing module installed.

The C610dtn we tested hikes paper capacity from 400 to 930 sheets through the addition of a second paper tray, which was easy to install under the printer. Adding a third tray (a $184 option) to the stack increases capacity to a truly impressive 1,460 sheets.

The C610cdn model combines the duplexer with a 16GB SD card for storage of overlays, macros and downloadable fonts, as well as the secure printing -- holding a print job until you enter a PIN at the printer's control panel, instead of leaving it in the output tray for anyone to see -- offered by other office printers with optional hard drives.

Toner! Toner! Toner!

For the most part, setting up the C610dtn proved relatively easy, with a couple of caveats. For instance, we would have appreciated slightly clearer directions for preparing the printer, especially when it came to removing the plastic protective sheets and tape from the starter 2,000-page cyan, magenta, yellow, and black toner supplies. We learned the hard way to search all around each and every cartridge and drum to remove all the packing tape before attempting to yank one of those sheets out. Perhaps better instructions would have saved us from having to vacuum up a bunch of cyan toner powder from our table and floor.

You access the toner through the top of the unit, which you open by pressing what is strangely the only unmarked button on the printer and flipping the cover up. Just make sure you leave plenty of room when doing so; you'll need about 27 inches of clearance to open it all the way to access all consumables. The top-cover-release button is located just to the left of the menu-driven operator controls and LCD panel, which, thankfully, is easy to read and navigate.

After you've used up the 2,000-page starter cartridges, you'll be able to move onto Oki's higher-capacity standard consumables. The Oki site lists these at $123 for the 8,000-page-rated black toner cartridge and $185 apiece for the cyan, magenta, and yellow cartridges, rated at 6,000 pages.

Each toner cartridge in Oki's two-piece consumable scheme requires its own drum, which requires replacing after about 20,000 pages, for $78 for the black and $83 each for the three colored drums. By our reckoning, the cartridges and drums add up to about 1.9 cents per monochrome and 12.4 cents per color page, which is competitive with desktop color lasers.

You can connect the printer to your network through its 10/100BaseT Ethernet port or directly to a PC or Mac through a USB 2.0 port, both of which are located on the back of the unit. Once connected, you install the driver software and then turn the printer on. Once the printer's been found, you are all set. It is that easy.

Our only complaint about the software installation process is that it required us to install each driver and utility -- such as Oki's Color Swatch Utility, Color Correct Utility and PS Gamma Adjuster -- one at a time, which was time-consuming and a bit of a pain. It would be less frustrating if you could just opt in or out of the aspects of the installation you don't want loaded onto your computer.

Also, although the C610dtn comes with the duplex printing hardware installed, the two-sided printing option kept coming up greyed out as "(none)" in print dialog boxes under "Oki C610(PCL) Properties." Eventually, we were able to correct this by finding the proper check box to enable duplex support. Once checked, "Long Edge (booklet)" and "Short Edge (flipbook)" two-sided joined "(none)" as duplex printing options.

Cruising Speed

During our stopwatch tests, the C610dtn didn't match its 32- and 34-ppm advertised speeds, but then again what printer ever does? It did, however, come remarkably close to Oki's claimed first-page-to-print times of eight and nine seconds for monochrome and color, respectively.

A 40-page, color- and text-rich document took a couple of minutes to print, closer to a slower but still solid 20 ppm. The same file took nearly but not quite twice as long to print in double-sided (duplex) mode. As expected, photos took quite a bit longer to print, at around 2.5 ppm under the printer's standard setting and a little over three minutes apiece in a higher quality setting.

According to the company, Oki's High Definition Color technology uses multilevel LED printheads and microfine toner for precise toner placement and deep, saturated colors. To our eyes, the printer delivered both sharp text and richly colored output during testing. Business documents looked particularly great.

As we've learned over the years, it can be tough to get the color of the images on your computer's display, particularly with photos, to match those on paper, no matter how fancy the printer. So it came as no surprise that photos printed a little too rich or dark and grainy for our tastes, at least at first. After some fiddling around with Oki's color management software and quality settings, however, we were much happier with the results of photo printouts, especially on coated paper, where flesh tones reproduced quite accurately.

The C610dtn supports PostScript 3 and PCL 6 as well as Windows XP and higher and Mac OS X 10.3 and higher clients. It includes 86 MonoType and 80 PostScript fonts and one original OCR font.

Oki's C610dtn is a solid color laser workalike for personal or network use that's easy to use and won't break the bank with the cost of consumables once it is up and running. While we wish it was a little easier to set up, the documentation on the bundled CD is quite informative and its output quality is well above average. It's a printer that can grow with your business.