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Entered CNET Catalog: 05/06/2004
SKU: 0051851156002
Manufacturer: Oki Printing Solutions
Manufacturer description
You don't have to give up speed, print quality or customer service to get an affordable desktop color/mono printer. For businesses as protective of their image as they are of the bottom line, compact OKI C5200n Series Digital Color printers are like two printers in one. They combine fast, high-quality OKI color and monochrome output with a low purchase price and low cost per page, so any of these printers can take the place of slower color inkjet and mono machines and stretch your budget. OKI C5200n Series printers turn out up to 16 full-color and 24 mono pages per minute, with the first color page printing in just 13 seconds, the first monochrome page in as little as 9 seconds. And those are crisp, bright pages at 1200 x 600 dpi.Product summary
The good: Affordable; tight design; backlit LCD; clear control-panel menus; perfect black-text quality; fastest color printer we've seen.
The bad: Yawn-worthy black-text speed; feeble color print quality.
The bottom line: The Oki C5200n joins the ranks of low-cost, network-enabled business color printers.
CNET editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 10/20/2004
The Oki C5200n weighs just shy of 60 pounds with consumables installed, which makes it easy to move--for someone in great shape. You'll have to be creative when hoisting the printer, since Oki provides only two handholds along the bottom edges. If you want to deploy the C5200n in a home office, you'll be glad to note the USB 2.0 port next to the Ethernet port. The control panel's backlit LCD angles upward from the printer's front lip to allow people of any height to read it clearly.
The single-pass design makes for simple maintenance. The C5200n's entire top panel, with the four LED arrays affixed to it, opens like a clamshell, exposing vertical slots where the four snap-together toner-and-imaging-drum assemblies drop straight in for easy replacement. For easy access to paper jams, the toner and the drum lift out to expose most of the paper path, and the front wall flops down to reveal more paper-jam sites. A back flap opens to allow stiff or delicate media such as card stock and labels to exit in a straight line, and a durable flap catches outgoing pages instead of letting them drop to the desk or the floor.
The per-page cost of the toner and the imaging drum for the C5200n adds up to a costly 2.9 cents per page, or 2.5 cents for black, depending on whether you buy 3,000-page or 5,000-page toner cartridges; at 16.8 cents or 14.1 cents per page, its color pages are steep compared to those of color lasers.
Without documentation, we managed to guess our way through a local installation. We couldn't find server-installation details on Okidata's Web site, so your network manager will likely improvise to set up a complicated network. Oki provides drivers for Windows 98 on up and for Macintosh starting with OS X 10.1.
Despite the Okidata Oki C5200n's affordability, it's equipped for an office rather than a well-heeled home user. That's clear when you look at Oki's software, which includes an embedded IP network. A management utility, PrintSuperVision, can report on how much workgroups are printing and at what cost. The printer can also send e-mail alerts when something goes awry.The basic Oki C5200n model includes a 300-sheet main paper tray and a 100-sheet auxiliary tray. Oki sells an additional 530-page paper tray for a stiff $456. The C5200n comes with only 32MB of memory but features an easily accessible slot that can hold a standard DIMM memory module to expand up to 256MB.
The C5200n's control panel is a model of clarity. Along with the backlit LCD and clearly labeled buttons, its hierarchical menu is easy to navigate to set up the printer's IP address, time sleep mode, or adjust color densities and registration. The driver software provides standard features with useful variations. Unlike those of most printers, Oki's driver allows you to choose the number of pages to fit onto your document when creating a patchwork-style poster. The Oki C5200n also prints banners up to 47 inches long. But the driver doesn't support manual duplexing, which forces you to spring for the $320 duplexer option if you want to conserve paper or create booklets by printing on both sides of a sheet.
The Okidata Oki C5200n delivered well-rounded printing speeds in our tests. Unlike most color printers, Oki machines print both monochrome and color at a similar rate; however, the C5200n was unimpressive in CNET Labs' grayscale printing tests, delivering only 13ppm for both text and graphics. But it's the fastest color printer we've tested, at 8.1ppm for text and 12ppm for graphics.Unlike its speed, the Oki C5200n's print quality fluctuated significantly between grayscale and color. Black text was perfect; our juries found no defects. The grayscale graphics, while short of flawless, were also very good. On the other hand, both color text and graphics suffered from color mismatching, and graphics, despite great detail, were dotty and showed a lot of banding.
Overall, the C5200n went through our tests without problems and met our expectations for a color printer of its class, although we'd like better color quality. The printer was tested with its factory-default settings, which can be adjusted for better output.
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Click here to learn more about how CNET Labs tests printers.
Performance analysis written by CNET Labs project leader Dong Van Ngo.
The Okidata Oki C5200n warranty provides one year of overnight-exchange coverage for most of the printer, while the LED arrays get five years of coverage. The company keeps its tech-support department open 24/7 via a toll-free telephone number.The C5200n comes with a 20-page onscreen setup guide that does a fine job walking you up to the point of installing driver software, then leaves you on your own to install the drivers. A 100-page onscreen user manual provides good detail on paper handling, the control panel, maintenance, and troubleshooting. Oki's Web site offers a sparsely populated knowledge base and downloads--good for updating drivers if your operating system changes. The spiral-bound, 40-page reference guide includes sticky strips to attach to the printer for a quick review of clearing jams, performing maintenance chores, and so on.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 User Rating: 
1/10
Horrible, Do Not Buy
Pros: There is absolutely nothing!
Cons: Strarted printing lines on page 2 months into ownership. Now it paperjams with nothing stuck in the printer. I've owned a computer company for several years, HP is the only way to go. I will never buy or recommend OKI to anyone.
User Rating: 
3/10
NOT reliable, POOR quality, Great Support
Pros: Network hookup is nice, that's it
Cons: Too many problems, HORRIBLE color quality
Also, this printer has so many failure modes, it's not reliable, won't print for whatever and has to be reset, fooled with (cartridge problems, feed problems, etc, etc... never ends) It's going to the trash.
User Rating: 
9/10
Great Printer
Pros: Excellent Printer, Great Prints, Easy to Setup on Windows Machines
Cons: Only one, I cant get it to work with my Linux Machine
I just wish i could get it to work with my linux machine, if anyone else knows how to fix it or if ive set it up wrong, please let me know Pyro919@gmail.com
User Rating: 3/10
drums go bad after 100 to 400 copies
Pros: it has an easy pass thru for banners
Cons: in 5000 pages I have replaced all the drums 3 times (12 drums)
User Rating: 9/10
Powerful Workhorse
Pros: Excellent output quality; excellent customer support
Cons: Color photo prints are only fair.
User Rating: 3/10
Very LOUD Printer.
Pros: Ok graphics
Cons: Long time to warm up, LOUD, Heavy.
------------------------>READ THIS REVIEW<---
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The biggest thing that disappointed me about this printer is that it is very LOUD and Takes few minutes to warm up. It has to warm up each time you print something. All the reviews I read before buying this printer never mentioned this. It also forces you to buy expensive toners, drums, tape, and other junk I never know about. It?s much cheaper to buy a new printer then maintain this one after the toner is out. I would not buy it if I knew this all before. Good Luck.
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User Rating: 
7/10
good printer / expensive consumables
Pros: fast, good quality printouts
Cons: replacement parts cost more than printer, crashes on some efax files
1. Turn machine on while pushing and holding the TWO up/down menu buttons at same time.
2. Menu window will show "OKI USER"
3. Scroll to " Engine Dialog Mode" is indicated. Push Enter button.
4. "Diagnostic Mode xx.xx.xx S-Mode is indicated.
5. Scroll to "NV-Ram initial" is indicated. Push ENTER.
6. Window shows "NV-Ram- Initial Table 1".
7. Push ONLINE and ENTER Buttons simultaneously and HOLD for 10 seconds after you see "Executing Reset" appear in menu window.
8. Restart printer.
All toner, drum, fuser and transfer figures return to 100%. Of course, if you are out of toner, you do need to refill the cartridges, but you can find refill toner and instructions on ebay (a bit messy, but cheaper than new cartridges). The drums, etc. won't work forever, but they will work longer than the artificial limits imposed by Okidata.
User Rating: 9/10
Best Color Laser I've seen
Pros: Great color for a laser.- easy network setup - very fast printing once it gets going
Cons: Really noisy upon startup - slow start
User Rating: 
8/10
Affordable single-pass color printer
Pros: FAST, good color, expandable
Cons: Footprint, NO DUPLEXING
User Rating: 
6/10
Excellent Print Quality, Poor Toner/Feed design
Pros: Print Quality is excellent. Colors are superb. Offers a straight paper path for cardstock. Easy access to toner cartidges.
Cons: Long warmup time. Constantly saying it is out of toner when it isn't. Jams frequently when using cardstock.
The biggest annoyance is the toner warning system. Even with new cartridges, it is constantly saying it is out of toner. It prints fine despite these warnings, but will occasionally go "offline" to get your attention that it is out of toner (which it isn't). Quite maddening.
Tried to print someone's wedding invitations with it. Finished product was flawless, however we had to manually assist each page or it would jam. It would jam about every 10th page regardless, requiring us to open the top (no need to remove paper because it didn't really jam, just didn't feed), then wait 1-2 minutes for it to go through it's checks before it would start printing again. Of course, we had to stay there because we had to manually assist the paper feed.
User Rating: 9/10
EXCELLENT customer/tech support!
Pros: Great quality, easy to use and setup, FAST printing, AWESOME customer/tech support - detail, responsible, short wait queue.
Cons: Need to be very careful when changing toner cartridge. I changed twice and had problems.
User Rating: 9/10
Great Price with easy to find consumables
Pros: Duplexing option, LAN connection built in, and great web based admin.
Cons: Glassy looking color photos.
