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General performance
Warm-up (3.73)
The C6000n warmed up in 64 seconds, about midway between the other two laser printers we’ve tested. The HP Color Laserjet 3600n, equivalent in price to the C6000n, took 99 seconds to come to ready status. A less expensive black-and-white laser, the Lexmark X342n, warmed up in 45 seconds.
Power Usage (4.13)
Laser printers are the power sloths of the printer world. It takes a lot of power to fuel those fast printing times and heating of the toner. Obviously, printers will vary in their power usage depending upon their construction, processor speeds, and other factors. The Oki C6000n falls in the midrange of laser printers so far tested. It’s equivalent to the HP CLJ 3600n in all power usage modes tested except for the printing mode. The Oki used a median of 487 watts, while the HP used 606 watts. We record the median wattage that printers use, since they all jump around as they perform the various micro-tasks associated with the printing function. For example, the C6000n jumped between 108 watts and 1,082 watts during our testing. The HP may have had a lower high end, at 900 watts, but it’s low-end, 300 watts, was higher than that of the C6000n.
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Power Usage (watts)
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Off
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Idle
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Ready
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Printing*
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Self-Cleaning
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Lexmark X342n
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0
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13
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17
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310
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n/a
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Oki C6000n
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0
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12
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25
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487
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n/a
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HP CLJ 3600n
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0
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12
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26
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606
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379
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*This is the median printing power usage. The wattage on all laser printers jumps around during printing.
Document Speed / Timing (8.06)
The Oki C6000n performed very well in our document speed tests, printing black text documents in 7.9 seconds per page (12.19 pages per minute [ppm]) and color graphics in 7 seconds (17.61 ppm). This put it behind the HP 3600n since this printer produced a single text page in 4.8 seconds (12.41 ppm) and a color graphics page in 4.2 seconds (15 ppm). This is an admittedly limited sample size. Although the Lexmark X342n’s document times were much faster, the very slow graphics printing times caused this printer to receive a lower score.
We also included document print speed times for two all-in-one inkjet printers (in italics) in the table below for comparison’s sake. In general, inkjet printing times are much slower than laser toner printers. These printers represent the fastest all-in-one inkjet yet tested (the HP C5180) and the slowest (the Kodak ES 5300).
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Document Print Speeds
in Pages per Minute (ppm)
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8.5 x 11 Text
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8.5 x 11 Graphics
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Oki C6000n
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12.19
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17.61
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HP CLJ 3600n
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12.41
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15.00
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Lexmark X342n
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24.38
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3.96
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HP Photosmart C5180
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6.00
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2.57
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Kodak EasyShare 5300
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1.59
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1.33
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Document Quality
Text (6.50)
It was difficult to detect any significant differences in our subjective viewing of the text clarity on the three laser printers we’ve tested—the Oki C6000n, the HP Color Laserjet 3600n, and the Lexmark X342n. Each printer produced crisp, dark text with mostly smooth edges. The HP printer appeared to produce the darkest and sharpest text, but the Oki text was nearly as sharp.
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HP Color Laserjet 3600n
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Oki C6000n
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Lexmark X342n
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Graphics (6.00)
Color rendition was very bright and vivid on the test PDF we printed with the Oki C6000n. Some colors did not reproduce faithfully, while others, like reds, were particularly bright, and even photos and illustrations looked good.
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