OKIDATA C7400 COLOR TONER CARTRIDGES SET

OkiData C7400 review

Overview:

A desktop size color laser printer best suited for a small workgroup, the OkiData C7400 offers a fairly standard feature set but shows its age in several aspects, most notably its printing speed. While users with lower paper throughputs will likely have no problems working with this model, environments that process a large number of large documents will likely want to choose one of its many faster successors.

Pros:

The C7400 measures 17" by 24.4" by 16.15" and weighs 105 lbs, making it consistent in size with and heavier than most other desktop printers. It will likely fit comfortably on a dedicated cabinet or credenza, though it could also be placed alongside other equipment on a table or desk. Adding additional paper trays will bring up the printer's height and weight considerably, likely making it a good idea to use a dedicated piece of furniture if planning to use them.

The C7400 produces documents at a maximum speed of 20 pages per minute in black and white and a maximum speed of 12 pages per minute in color, as well as at a maximum resolution of 1200 by 1200 dpi, consistent with the image output by almost all color laser printers.

The printer supports printing to letter, legal, executive, A4, A5, A6, B5, envelope, and custom sized documents between 3.4" by 5.5" and 8.5" by 14". The C7400's standard paper input consists of a 530 sheet cassette and a 100 sheet front feeder capable of processing Monarch, COM-9, COM-10, C5, and DL envelopes. If needed, it's possible to add 2nd and 3rd paper cassettes sized at 530 sheets each, bringing the printer's total capacity up to 1690 sheets. Conveniently, duplex printing is available as a standard feature on this printer, making it very easy to produce two-sided documents.

The printer includes font support for PostScript III and PCL 5C through emulation, with 80 Agfa Scalable PCL typefaces, 136 PostScript typefaces, 1 bitmap font, and OCR A/B fonts. The printer includes drivers for Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows NT. It interfaces with devices through a bi-directional parallel interface. A 10/100 Base-TX Ethernet card is available as an add-on, but is not included standard.

The printer ships with 256 MB of RAM, which can be expanded to 1 GB if desired by adding 64MB, 128 MB, and 256 MB DIMMs. 

Cons:

While 20 pages per minute for black and white printing was quite good many years ago, the speed of 12 pages per minute for color is noticeably slow. Furthermore, many newer printers offer speeds upwards of 30-50 pages per minute across both with almost equal first page outs.

The C7400 does not include a USB port, making it extremely difficult to connect this printer to newer systems in non-networked environments. While there are adapters designed to address this in some circumstances, there are a number of potential driver and compatibility issues, making this a difficult printer to recommend to any environment not working almost exclusively with legacy PCs.

Furthermore, networking is not standard with this model, requiring that users seek out an internal print server in order to interface the printer with additional devices. Many newer models include a 10/100 Base-TX Ethernet port standard.

Despite its high paper capacity the printer lacks many newer options available with many multifunction printers, such as hard drive storage for documents and secure networking. Users looking for such features will need to consider another, newer printer, over this one.