Information wanted: Oki color LED printers

A friend needs a new printer to replace his Epson inkjet. His
particular Epson has been troublesome and Epson's support hasn't
been helpful. He needs color. He goes through 20 reams per year!

My experience with the reliability of my Oki 12i black printer
has been very good; it's also been the standard printer of my
county's library system.

Can anyone give me any information about the performance of
present-day Oki color LED printers? He needs to spend around
$200-300 on the printer, and consumables should be as affordable
as possible. And no fun and games with chipping/toner/drum "gotchas."

Thanks.

Richard
PS: For them who don't know, LED printers are identical to laser
printers except that the image is created on the drum not with a
laser assembly but with a row of LEDs. Thus, the LED printer's
image generating system has no moving parts. Elegant.

On 26-Dec-2009, Richard Steinfeld
wrote:

PS: For them who don't know, LED printers are identical to laser
printers except that the image is created on the drum not with a
laser assembly but with a row of LEDs. Thus, the LED printer's
image generating system has no moving parts. Elegant.

Fine until one or more of the LED array fails, but then most
hardware has failure modes, and commonly the expensive
moving parts. It's often a trade off between a cheap price and a
decent warranty period.

"Ato_Zee" wrote:
On 26-Dec-2009, Richard Steinfeld
wrote:

PS: For them who don't know, LED printers are identical to laser
printers except that the image is created on the drum not with a
laser assembly but with a row of LEDs. Thus, the LED printer's
image generating system has no moving parts. Elegant.

Fine until one or more of the LED array fails, but then most
hardware has failure modes, and commonly the expensive
moving parts. It's often a trade off between a cheap price and a
decent warranty period.


I have never seen a LED array fail on any OKI printer and I have worked with
hundreds of them.
On the other hand I have seen many failed laser assemblies.
Overall I believe the LED design is superior in terms of image management.
OKI colour printers have the advantage of a flat paper path allowing easy
handling of card, many can print banners. The flat bed design also allows for
the colour drums on most models to be lifted out of the path by the printer
when not printing colour resulting in cost saving.
They do however have chips and other techniques to deter remanufactured toners
and drums but these are available. Remanufacturing the drum units is not for
the faint hearted.
Tony

"Elmo P. Shagnasty" wrote:

What's popularly called a "laser printer" is part of a class of printers
known as "page printers". Such printers must assemble the entire page
bitmap in memory before it fires up the imaging system and pulls paper.

Compare this to line or character printers, which don't have to know a
thing about the entire page--they just take in character commands, one
at a time, and execute them.

I dunno. If you put that page eject character in the band/chain/line printers it
became a page printer in a hurry. smile

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

Richard Steinfeld wrote:

Can anyone give me any information about the performance of
present-day Oki color LED printers? He needs to spend around
$200-300 on the printer, and consumables should be as affordable
as possible. And no fun and games with chipping/toner/drum "gotchas."

Even the ink jet pinters are now coming with chipping gotchas. A newer printer
stated an inkjet cartridge was out of date even though it had just been opened. And
the cartrdige worked fine on an older printer.

So I doubt very much you're going to escape the gotchas except by finding other mfrs
cartridges with reset chips, etc, etc.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/