LED Colour Printer Claims Laser Quality, B&W Speed

OKI Pushes the "Other White Meat" of Office Printing

By Jim Bray

Businesses who want to do colour printing in-house have an interesting new tool at their disposal.

It’s OKI’s new Okipage 8c LED Colour Page Printer, which the company claims offers colour laser performance with black & White laser speed.

LED?

Aren’t LED’s (light emitting diodes) those blinking or glowing little readouts you can get on everything from digital watches to kiddie toys?

Yep. OKI’s LED technology is an alternative to laser and inkjet printing that the company hopes will bring it even more success in the office printing field than it’s had with the well-known "impact" (read "Dot Matrix") printers that are still carving out a niche in the marketplace.

So just as pork was hyped as "the other white meat" a few years ago, you can almost think of LED printers as "the other colour printer for business." OKI says the colour LED printer is affordable and fast (compared with colour laser printers), and with a cost of ownership that (unlike colour inkjet printers) also contributes to a warm feeling on the part of its owners.

At a recent meeting with me, Lon Campbell, GM of OKI’s Canadian operations, was upbeat about the LED printer’s potentials – and I have to admit the concept sounds intriguing.

"No other desktop colour page printer can match the Okipage 8c’s combination of high speed, professional-quality output, and extreme reliability," Mr. Campbell said, crediting the unit’s "single pass Colour Digital Technology and belt-drive transport system" with much of the efficiency.

You see, OKI has lined up the 8c’s four print heads one after the other, so the paper only goes through the printer’s innards once, as opposed to the four passes Mr. Campbell says are required by conventional colour laser printers. This not only speeds things up considerably, I would imagine it also means less wear and tear on the printer and the paper going through it.

The Okipage 8c sells for under five grand Canadian, claims 600 dpi performance, eight full colour pages per minute, and with a 6,000 page per month colour duty cycle. If those claims are true, those are pretty heavy duty specs.

Now, I haven’t had a chance to play with the unit, so can’t comment on the manufacturer’s claims, but Mr. Campbell admitted that at least one other major printer maker is now jumping on the LED bandwagon as well, and I can’t imagine that would happen if the technology didn’t work. And a presentation I was shown, printed from the OKIPAGE 8c, looked very nice, indeed.

The printer is compatible with Windows 3.x and 9x, as well as (arrggh!) DOS applications. It can be configured with an optional Internal Print Server for operation in Peer-to-Peer, Novell, Windows NT, and Mac environments, and even the base model comes standard with Adobe PostScript 3 emulation.

And you can stuff 600 sheets of letter or legal sized paper (or transparency film, card stock, and "other media") into the bin at a time.

So now there’s another printer to lust after. Anyone have five grand to spare?

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