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 Likes- Good print quality
- Good black-and-white photo quality
- Good color management options
- Fast print speeds
Dislikes
- Confusing documentation
- Poor color accuracy and gamut scores
- Heavy and awkward design
Conclusion
The Oki C6000n is a small office laser printer capable of fast print speeds and decent image quality.
With an all white chassis, the C6000n is similar in appearance to most other single function lasers on the market. However, the printer’s design is more horizontal, which makes it shorter and perhaps more able to fit into tighter spaces, except when you need to access the toner cartridges. It’s a heavy, awkward printer to move around, which is perhaps not an important consideration if you plan on unpacking it and leaving it in place for the life of the printer. It does take up a fair amount of desk space, when you consider the open trays and doors. Accessing the cartridges requires opening the top door, which extends the printer’s height to more than two-and-a-half feet.
The Oki has a basic, two-line LCD display, standard on most laser printers. Its control panel is simple, yet effective. The buttons are easy to use and respond well. The input tray sits beneath the printer and is easily accessed and loaded. The multi-purpose tray opens from the front of the printer easily and folds back into place when not in use. This tray accepts heavier weight papers, transparencies, labels, and envelopes.
Most laser printers have extensive menus accessed through their tiny LCD screens, and the C6000n is no exception. Users can set paper type for each tray, adjust color density for each cartridge, and a slew of other fine tuning options.
The printer’s drivers are very user friendly, and they provide several options for print quality and color management, something absent on many other color laser printers. Users can even choose to use custom ICC profiles. Two print drivers, PCL and PostScript, give the user different choices, with greater font substitution options in the PCL driver.
Warm-up time was about average, as was power usage. Print speeds for documents, graphics, and photos were quick, about 7 seconds for documents and 4 seconds for 4-by-6-inch photos. Color accuracy and color gamut, measures of how closely the printer’s colors matched an ideal and the range of printable colors, respectively, scored very badly, as was the case with other laser printers tested. For more information on print speed and quality, see the Document Performance and Photo Performance pages.
The Oki C6000n’s black-and-white printing quality was moderate, with a dmax value of 1.83, much better than the other two laser printers we’ve tested, but still far shy of the capabilities of inkjet printers. Given this, the C6000n yielded a decent black-and-white photo print, with a good range of tones, although the shadow areas were certainly lacking in depth.
Toner cartridges are very easily accessed and replaced, and page yield estimations are comparable with the HP 3600n. Cost per page is slightly more expensive for the color toner than the HP 3600n and the Xerox Phaser 8560n.
The Oki C6000n has a greater processor speed than the HP 3600n and equivalent to the other two competitively priced models, the Lexmark C534n and the Xerox Phaser 8560n. The C6000n’s paper capacity is also greater than the HP model, equivalent to the C534n, and less than the Xerox. None of the four units come with standard duplexing; HP has the cheapest option for adding that feature, and Lexmark the most expensive. All four printers are Ethernet-ready, but only the Oki doesn’t support wireless networking. The Oki C6000n’s internal memory is about in the middle of what the other printers offer, although the Xerox model can be upgraded the most, to 1 gb. The Phaser 8560n’s solid ink technology also produces less waste than toner printers. Check out the Comparisons section on the Overall Impressions page for more information.
Value-conscious consumers may want to look elsewhere if they’re considering the Oki C6000n. While competitively priced, on the whole the laser printer has less features than its peers and cost per page is a bit more than the competition. We appreciated the Oki’s good user interface, color management options, and fast print speeds, but if Xerox’s specs are correct, the Phaser 8560n will give the user faster output, with less of an environmental footprint to boot.
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