OKIDATA C7100 COLOR TONER CARTRIDGES SET

OkiData C7100 review

Overview:

The OkiData C7100 is another entry in OkiData's extensive series of desktop color laser printers, one which offers a fairly substantive feature set and expandability options for users who need them. However, several years after its manufacture, it shows its age in several regards, making it a difficult printer to recommend to new environments unless it can be acquired for a remarkably low cost.

Pros:

The C7100 measures 16.9" by 24.41" by 17" and weighs 104.7 lbs, making it fairly large and quite heavy. While it will fit alongside other equipment on a table or desk, its weight may make it best suited to a dedicated piece of furniture such as a cabinet or credenza for storage and easy access.

The printer produces sheets at a maximum speed of 16 pages per minute in color and 24 pages per minute in black and white. It produces documents at the industry standard resolution of 1200 by 600 dpi.

The C7100 supports printing to sheets sized A4, A5, B5, A6, Legal 13, Legal 13.5, Legal 14, Letter, and Executive. It features a 530 sheet standard paper input alongside a 100 sheet multipurpose tray, and two additional 530 sheet trays can be added to bring the printer's paper capacity up to 1690 sheets, well over three reams and more than most small to moderate offices go through on a daily basis. Automatic duplex printing is available as an add-on.

In order to ensure accurate document reproduction, the printer includes built-in support for emulation of Adobe PostScript 3, with direct PDF printing and PCL5 support, as well as Epson FX and IBM ProPrinter Dot Matrix emulation. The printer includes 80 scalable PCL fonts, 1 bitmap font, 10 TrueType fonts, 136 Adobe Type 1 fonts, and support for both OCR A/B and USPS Barcode.

The printer interfaces with systems using either an IEEE-1284 Parallel port or USB 1.1. Users who need networking support can add a 10/100 Base TX Ethernet card with an internal web server to network the printer, allowing for almost all network protocols to be supported. The printer works with almost all versions of Windows and Mac OS, as well as a number of flavors of both Unix and Linux. Supported network protocols include submission via email through POP3 and SMTP, TCP/IP, Netware, Ethertalk, and NetBEUI. Print control software is included, as is PrintSuperVision and a template management system.

The printer ships with 64MB of RAM, which can be expanded to 1GB by installing additional DIMM modules in 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB sizes. An internal hard drive is also available as an expansion option. 

Cons:

While the C7100's print speeds were fine at its time of manufacture, they are now considerably slower than what is offered by many models, as there are desktop units capable of printing upwards of 30 to 35 sheets per minute and industrial MFPs capable of printing upwards of 40 and 50 pages per minute, much faster than what this model can offer.

Despite its large paper capacity, the C7100 does not include many of the sophisticated paper handling options available on newer models. Users looking for automatic sheeting, stapling, and stacking functions will need to find another model, as this one is limited strictly to duplex printing.

For users not planning on implementing the printer in a network environment, transfers may be slowed considerably by the fact that the C7100 features only a USB 1.1 port for data transfers, rather than USB 2.0, which is considerably faster.