Printerland Blog

IT PRO gives a 5 STAR review on Oki MC860DN A3 Colour Printer

With its latest MC860dn, Oki has taken the compact design of its 8000 series A3 colour lasers and produced a multifunction printer (MFP) that’s one of the smallest of its type. With top claimed A4 mono and colour print speeds of 34ppm and 26ppm respectively it also rivals many of the larger MFP solutions from vendors such as HP, but comes in with a price tag that makes it more affordable for smaller businesses.

It offers A3/A4 print, copy, scan and fax functions straight out of the box and the base unit on review here can be upgraded with plenty of paper handling options. The MC860dn includes network support plus an internal duplex unit and you can add a second base unit with an extra 500-sheet tray or go for the version with two trays that takes paper capacity to 1,460 sheets.

The MC860dn looks and feels very well built and compared with some of the A3 monsters we’ve had in the lab is definitely a lot more compact. It’s small enough to sit on a desktop although this will need to be sturdy as the base system tips the scales at 68kgs. The colour scanner offers a top 600dpi resolution and includes a 50-sheet automatic document feeder (ADF) that can handle A3 and A4 paper sizes.

We found the operator control panel easy enough to use with its large LCD touch screen display frequently providing hints and tips on various operations. Basic colour or mono copies and scans are one button operations and you can also scan documents directly to email, local and network PCs or to a USB storage device inserted in the front port. Note that you can’t print from a USB device.

For network scans you can create profiles using the touch screen panel where you describe the destination system, the target folder and whether the image should be output in PDF, JPEG, XPS or TIFF format. We had no problems sending scanned documents directly to a folder on our test server over CIFS and FTP.

Oki’s Configuration Tool makes this process even easier as it is used to remotely add entries and import text files to lists on the printer for fax speed dials, group phone books, email addresses and copy destination profiles. We were able to configure the printer’s email settings and copy documents directly as email attachments. Access to printer functions and colour printing can be strictly controlled with user names and PIN numbers, which determine precisely what they are allowed to do.

The 40GB hard disk is for storing overlays, fonts and macros and can be used to automatically collate multiple copies of large documents. Confidential prints can be spooled to the hard disk and held back until an operator enters their PIN number at the printer. Oki also provides a simple utility for remotely accessing the drive and managing its contents and the disk also offers secure erase and data encryption features.

Oki’s software bundle includes the Actkey utility, which pulls documents directly from the printer to a local folder over a USB connection. A system tray tool alerts you when a print is completed or a fax has been received or sent and the package is rounded off with ScanSoft OmniPage SE 4 and PaperPort SE OCR and document management utilities. Oki also includes its PrintSuperVision tool, which installs a web server on your chosen management station from where you can remotely view and access all networked printers – including those from other vendors.

Our performance tests showed the MC860dn delivering on all counts, with it producing a 34-page Word document in 61 seconds and tackling our 24-page heavy duty colour DTP document in 52 seconds. The latter took the same time on the General 600dpi and Fine 1,200 x 600 dpi driver settings and on the top interpolated ProQ2400 option it took a further seven seconds. A4 Copy operations are slower with a 12-page colour document taking 66 seconds from button press to final page for an average of 11ppm. Mono copies are much speedier with the same document reproduced in this mode in 45 seconds.

General colour output quality is very good with crisp, sharp text across a range of font sizes. Our colour test chart showed almost imperceptible stepping across colour fades and grey shades using different mixes of cyan, yellow and magenta were faithfully reproduced. Colour scans of reports are reasonably good if a little grainy, but quality does drop when scanning photos and particularly on mono scans.

Colour print output bears the characteristic vibrancy and high levels of detail we’ve seen with most of Oki’s colour LED printers, so reports and A3 picture posters have that extra zing to make them stand out. We also found that the cross-hatch banding effect characteristic of this LED technology was almost unnoticeable.

There are consumables galore as you have toner cartridges, drum kits, fusers and transfer belts to replace. Mono cartridges are good for 9,500 pages, whilst colour ones last for 10,000 pages and adding everything together delivers a mono A4 page for just under a penny and a colour one at very reasonable 5.6 pence.

The MC860dn shows A3 colour MFPs don’t need a huge amount of office space. Along with its compact design, it provides good overall output quality, delivers on its performance promises and compared with similar products from the likes of HP looks particularly good value.

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