Oki MC560

Excellent colour laser MFP printer – Owned now for a month and so far very impressed. This is the third laser MFP I’ve owned. It replaced a Brother colour laser MFP which was a poor performer and which went in the bin after two years ($1,200 wasted). Good points: Great price. Excellent colour photo output – not as a good as an photo inkjet on photo paper but far better than anything else I’ve seen. Output has a slight shine to it which I like. Speed is good and it doesn’t take long for the first print from cold (half the time of the Brother). It has a power save button which can put it into or take it out of power save mode; this is a surprisingly useful feature.

Scans fast – uses a LED lamp so there’s no waiting for a cold cathode tube to heat up. Scanner is a duplex/reversing type – a feature I use a lot. Original toner cartridges and parts appear to be about the same price as other brands. I do a lot of booklet printing – it does this well and on 120 GSM card too.

Cons: Instruction manual is appalling so it is somewhat difficult to set up. I eventually got it going more or less how I wanted but it took an afternoon. Some odd software quirks which you get used to but remain slightly annoying For example to scan to your PC you can’t just open your PC program – Adobe, Photoshop, &c. You first have to press SCAN on the printer control panel then scroll through to ‘Scan to remote PC’. After a few minutes this defaults back to copy so if you have further scanning you have to go back to the printer control panel. I haven’t yet worked out how to set up a default fax cover page.

It’s somewhat noisy when heating up and printing. Doesn’t worry me but some might find it too much. There is some fan noise when on standby but this stops when it goes into power save mode.

Summary – this is a great small office printer with a lot of advanced features – and high quality output. Downside is confusing instructions and quirky software. Good price, quality output Somewhat noisy. Complex software.