OKI C830 A3 Color LED For the Price of an A4 Printer

OKI C830 A3 Color LED For the Price of an A4 Printer

The printer looks very common that it is not surprising: OKI has been manufacturing devices with such design for many years. The main family features are the silhouette of smoothed box, the printing path with horizontal paper guiding, the upper output tray and a distinctive control panel.

The printer cartridges have a design typical for OKI design that allows separate replacement of drum and cartridge with the toner. The declared drum yield exceeds that of the cartridge more than twice: 20,000 and 8,000 pages respectively. The starter cartridges, as usual, contain toner only enough for 2000 pages.

Color Printer

On the right side, under the covering is hiding a hatch that gives access to expansion slots. The C830 model allows for memory expansion of up to 768 MB (the onboard 256 MB and optional 512 MB module), as well as the installation of an optional hard disk. As usual, apart from these options are available additional trays and floor stand, as well as two-sided printing unit.

For communication with the outer world the printer is equipped with an Ethernet port, a USB and parallel port. The last two in such machinery are added for extreme or very special applications, but for the vast majority of modern systems and applications the network port can be used.

Like any "big" printer, OKI C830 makes it possible to use the emulation of different languages and protocols: PostScript 3, PCL 5c, PCL XL, PCL 6, HP-GL, Epson FX and IBM Pro Printer III XL.

The specifications of the printer promise us a fairly good speed: 30 and 32 ppm for color and monochrome modes, respectively. However, the measured maximum speed in color barely approached 20 ppm in A4 format. The maximum for the A3 is even less -- 17.5 ppm.

As it turned out, speed parameters are set in the printer menu, but protected by the administrator password, so at the time of the test, we had to be content with the default settings.

For a multi-page document with color illustrations tasks processing significantly slowed and the rate of printing did not exceed 10 ppm (Auto Mode, Regular 600x600). The PCL was quicker: 9,7 ppm and 8.5 ppm for A4 and A3, respectively. PostScript mode worked very leisurely: 7.7 ppm and 5.4 ppm for A4 and A3, respectively.

The color printing on OKI C830 was frankly pleasing. First, a good full-color A3 print by itself produces a very positive impression. And secondly, OKI prints are not just good but excellent: reliable color reproduction, wide range of reproducible colors, high resolution and excellent printing quality of text.

We cannot help mentioning the very soundly implemented toner saving mode, which has already been become a characteristic of OKI printers. The text printed in this mode is easy to read even in small sizes, so the saving is not in a rough screening of the text and pictures (which can be seen in models of many other manufacturers), but in reducing the density of the toner. Therefore, the text becomes gray, but with clear and straight boundaries. Pictures, of course, lose in quality more, but nevertheless remain quite acceptable.

Despite the optimistic specifications data, OKI C830 does not set speed records, its design and ergonomics do not shine perfection, and in the process it may give you little surprises. For one, that strange necessity to hide almost all the custom settings for the administrator password.

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