Review: Oki C3200 laser printer

The second single-pass printer here, Oki’s C3200 is not a laser printer at all.

Instead it uses less expensive LED technology to achieve much the same effect. It also has the distinction of being the fastest colour printer of the group, rated at 12ppm in full colour.

Despite using single-pass technology, print speeds in colour and mono are not the same on the C3200.

There are no extra passes required to print in colour but Oki, realising that it could safely run its print engine faster when using a single colour, has designed the printer to move the colour printing components out of the way while printing in mono and at the same time ramp up the speed.

This allows the C3200 to achieve speeds of up to 20ppm in mono.

In our colour pdf test, the C3200 was far and away the fastest device in this group test – it won’t take many colour pages in your mix of print jobs to prove itself a very fast printer indeed.

Only if you print the vast majority of your pages in mono could you consider its black and white performance to be an issue.

Unfortunately, all this speed comes at the expense of image quality, which was judged to be joint lowest for mono text quality and achieved lowest when printing colour photos.

These were quite noticeably inferior to those of the laser-based competitors. Colours were drab and skin tones simply didn’t look realistic.

While many of the output samples required quite close scrutiny to discern differences, the output of the C3200 was easily picked out from a distance. Even the ‘photo-enhance’ option was unable to rescue it.

The standard version of this printer is fitted with a high-speed USB2 port, to which the C3200n adds Ethernet connectivity, an LCD control panel and optional auto duplex printing.

This is part of a group test on budget colour laser printers. Other articles are:
Introduction and editor's choice
Canon Laser Shot LBP 5200
Dell 3100cn
Epson Aculaser C1100N
HP Color Laserjet 2600n
Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL
Lexmark C510n
Xerox Phaser 6120
The Real Cost of Printing