Need a Laser Printer? Oki Doki

The biggest problem with laser printers has always been their cost. When I got my first laser printer for personal use it was a model stripped down for home use and thus available at a mere few thousands of dollars. In fairness, the printer more than earned its keep by lasting more than 10 years (it still works!). However, price was always an inhibiting factor - I certainly wouldn't have been able to afford that printer if I hadn't gotten a grant for computer equipment when I was in school.

As with all things computer, as time progresses the prices drop. The same people who once paid $4000 for a lowish end home computer are now outraged if they can't find what they want for $400. The same people who got multi-thousand dollar laser printers can now get them for a few hundred dollars. A few years ago I bought the Okidata OL610e laser printer for $600. It too is still going strong.

In addition to price drops, computer equipment generally gets smaller over time (except for monitors which thankfully get bigger). The Okidata printer is quite small and light. It's small enough to fit easily on a chair or on a single desk along with a tower, a 19" CRT monitor, and a fairly bulky flatbed scanner. The physical footprint is less than half that of my older laser printer and much less than some of the smaller HP business laser printers. It's also light enough that it could be easily carried from one location to another and used as a traveling printer.

One of the drawbacks of this compact size is a small paper tray. It has one tray at the bottom of the printer that holds a mere 100 sheets of standard 20 pound paper. The tray itself is easy to fill with a spring loaded catch to make sure the tray is fully inserted once filled. The paper tray will hold paper A4 and smaller (letter, A5, etc) and has a slider that holds any standard size paper in place to prevent sliding and paper jams.

Speaking of paper jams, this printer almost never jams. Every once in a while if you overstuff the paper tray it will, but that's generally the only time. If you keep the paper tray filled normally or slightly under the fill mark you should have no real troubles with paper jams.

Jams are still rare but are slightly more frequent when you use the manual feed mechanism. Hidden behind a door that pops out above the paper tray, the manual feed supports envelopes, legal size paper, and everything in between. I find the door sticks and is difficult to open. Once opened, the manual feed works fairly well. There are sliding guides that move in and out to match the width of whatever you are printing to help properly position envelopes and other items that don't span the entire width of the printer. On some printers I've had problems with envelopes getting snagged on these types of guides but I've never had that problem with the Okidata.

The printer uses a roller print system and the toner itself comes in small cylinders that are very easy to replace. The top front of the printer has two tabs to press to get access to the inside. Once opened, the toner roller is at the very front of the printer and snaps in and out very easily. Even so, you won't have to swap toner cartridges very often. Rated for 2000 sheets per cartridge, in my experience they actually last quite a bit longer. You normally have to expect the cartridges to print less than they are rated for, so this was a very pleasant surprise. They average around 4000 sheets printed, mainly text with a moderate number of heavily graphical scanned pages thrown in too. When you do need replacement toner cartridges they're easy to find online and cost around $30 each shipped. That's a pretty good cost per page ratio for a printer.

Printing at 600x600 dpi, you can certainly find printers with better resolution. However,the print quality of the Okidata is exceptional in my experience. It prints crisp dark text. It's excellent for any mainly textual printing while still presenting reasonable monochrome graphics when needed. It prints 6 pages per minute which again isn't the fastest available today but certainly is fast enough that you rarely find yourself tapping your fingers in frustration while waiting for something to print. It prints extremely quietly, with only a small hum as the page prints. Unless you're sitting at or very near the computer desk you won't hear the printer. It's definitely the quietest laser printer I've ever used.

The printed pages come out on the top of the printer face down, a pretty standard arrangement for laser printers.The printer is small enough that the printed letter size paper hangs over the edge of the printer by default. If you're only printing one or two pages that's fine, but if you're printing more at once the pages will fall unless you extend the catch tray. Basically you can pull out a small two inch extension to the top of the printer that will fit all sizes up to and including A4. The extension has a notch that will hold about 15 pages without any problems, but you can also extend a small wire catch that slides out from the tray extension to about 30 degrees past vertical away from the printer. This will easily hold several hundred pages of output at once. The one thing to note is that it makes access to the paper tray a bit harder and since the tray only holds 100 pages that may be an issue.

The Okidata is older and thus uses parallel connections rather than USB. It has both Mac and PC parallel ports available and also a SCSI port if you really want to try printing that way (I don't recommend it). If your computer has gone all USB and Firewire you'd need a converter for this printer and it probably isn't worth it. If you still have a parallel port and need a compact laser printer it's certainly worth looking at, particularly with subsequent price drops. I've seen this printer for as little as $150 online and at that price it's a real steal.