The Okidata OL810e/PS is a 600x1200 DPI LED laser printer targeted at the SOHO market.
This document describes the author's experience with the printer, and provides opinions and links relating to the printer.
I've been looking for a laser printer for a while and had not found anything suitable. My four criteria were:
Normally, with the recent events in the printer market, most of these criteria would be easy to fill were it not for the fact that the only non-Apple printers that work with Macs are postscript printers, and a postscript option adds at least $200 to the price of a printer. I had given up hope of finding a new printer for this price range, and was looking at purchasing a refurbished printer, when I found a site on the web that was offering these Okidatas for a phenomenal price. I purchased mine for $339.00 (plus $50 shipping - ouch!)
About a week later (thanks to the UPS strike) I received my printer. So far, I've been absolutely thrilled! Read on for more specifics.
The quality of the OL810e is excellent. My own experience, and according to several reviews, is that the OL810e suffers nothing for being an LED printer. Lines are crisp and clean, and curves are not jagged.
Text output from the 810e is consistently high-quality, with no artifacts, skips, or banding.
Graphic output is supposed to be the 810e's weak point, and I confess that I don't personally have much experience in this area. However, it is my opinion that the OL810e's graphic output is as good as can be expected from a monochrome laser printer. I noticed no banding, consistently dark black and a reasonable gray scale. For the kinds of graphics I usually use (horizontal or vertical rules, etc.), the 810e is more than adequate.
The OL810e is a curious machine in some ways. For instance, the printer comes with a variable power-save feature, with three time settings for when the 810e goes into power-save mode: 0 minutes, 8 minutes, and never. Low power mode is a wonderful feature, but it adds about half a minute onto the time of the first page if the printer is in power-save mode when you print. After this, however, the 810e seems to keep up with the specification of 8 pages a minute, although printing pages with graphics slows things down some.
In this section I'm going to talk about all the little things you won't find in the manual; you know, the things they tell you, but don't really mean much until you've used them yourself.
First, the software interface is really nice. The printer comes with 6 disks, four of them Windows oriented. I can't say much about that, as I'd rather have my fingers removed than be forced to work with Windows. The other two disks are in Macintosh format and contain the Mac printer drivers (and installation software), the postscript printer definition file (.ppd), and Macintosh screen fonts. I installed support for the printer on my Macintosh, my Intel NeXTSTEP computer, and Linux. Installation on all three were easy, and installation on the Mac was trivial. Support for the printer through the PPD file is superb under both NeXT and the Mac, with a rich array of printer options available from the print panel. For instance, under both the Mac and NeXT, you can at print time change:
I have not yet been able to get BeOS to work with this printer, but printer support in the preview release of BeOS is, shall we say, rather limited.
The printer itself is great to work with. The toner and print cartridge are very easy to remove, and jams are easily fixed. By sliding out various trays on the printer you can choose where the output is fed (out the back, out the front), and a drop-down tray provides access to the manual page source feeder. The menu, accessible through an LCD and 8 buttons, is easy to navigate. The most complimentary thing I can say about the menu is that you'll probably never have to use it. The printer not only auto-detects the language of the incoming data and switches itself between PCL5 and Postscript, but it also accepts input from either hardware port. At this moment, I have both my Mac and my NeXT/Linux box hooked up to the printer; my fiancee and I alternate printing without either of us having to touch the printer.
The printer accepts a wide variety of print media. So far I've only printed to business envelopes and standard letter-size paper, but the manual assures me that I'll have no problem printing on transparencies and self-adhesive paper. I was particularly amused to discover that the printer is more intelligent than the software I'm using. I was printing an envelop with a special envelop-printing program, which automatically adjusted the output so that the printer would print the data at the correct place on the envelop. It turns out that the 810e knows an envelop when it sees one, and adjusts it's print area accordingly. As a result, the upper-left corner of any print area really is the upper-left corner of the media you are printing onto, no adjustments necessary.
The intelligence of the printer continues; when you tell the printer, through software, to take input from the manual feed tray, the printer informs you through the control panel LCD not only that it is waiting for you to insert paper, but exactly what kind of media it is expecting (A10, Envelope, etc.).
The printer input/output design is well thought-out. I'm sure this is not unusual, but I was pleased to discover that when printing double-sided manuals, it was simply a matter of printing the odd pages, taking the output and placing it in the input tray, and printing the even pages. I didn't have to shuffle a single page. The input is also very intuitive. It is easy to tell how the pages will be printed, what side of the page and what orientation, so inserting special paper (letterhead, etc.) is never a matter of guess-work. The printer tray is well designed. The spring loading occurs after you replace the tray, so you don't have to fight the tray to load your paper. The tray also has a nifty little gauge which tells you, roughly, how much paper you have left in the tray.
I've been raving about the wonders of the printer, so here's the point where I drop the other shoe. I have found several small irritations with the printer, but I'm not yet ready to fault the printer entirely for these problems and not my own unfamiliarity with the device. Truly, the more I use the printer, the less often these problems come up.
First off, I've had one paper jam from the tray feeder. This was probably due to my inserting a freshly printed sheet of paper back into the tray for printing on the other side. Also, the manual feed seems rather sporadic in its behavior. The manual feed is supposed to grab the sheet your are inserting and suck it a couple of centimeters into the printer. It does so, but not consistently. Now, I'm not sure that it is never supposed to grab from the manual feed unless told to through software or the printer menu, but the fact of the matter is that if you are printing one sheet and you want it to be taken from the manual tray, you're playing the odds if you don't have your software tell the printer to do so. What is worse is that if the printer fails to do its pre-grab of the media, it will still take from the manual tray, but will invariably jam when it tries to print. Luckily, as I've said before, jams are easily remedied. As an added bonus, when the printer jams, it reprints the jammed page after you fix it.
My one big gripe about the printer is that you can only insert one page at a time through the manual feed. If you want to print, say, 10 pages onto special paper, you either do it one at a time or remove the tray and insert them onto the stack.
The memory is also wonderful on this printer. It comes with adequate memory, and if the manual is to be believed, the built-in Enhanced Memory Management package more than doubles your effective memory. But the best thing is that this printer takes regular SIMMs. That's right. Run down to your local computer store, spend little more than $50, and you've got 10MB of RAM in your printer. I haven't done it yet, but I've read the instructions, and installation looks to be a breeze.
Note that while one OL810e manual claims that memory can be expanded up to 34MB, a second manual that also came with the printer claims that a maximum of 19MB can be installed in the 810e/PS. This second manual correctly identifies my printer as having 3MB of installed memory (the first incorrectly claims that I have but 2MB), but the second manual also claims that the largest SIMM that can be installed is a 16MB SIMM. The 810e has a single memory slot (the default memory is on-board). The second manual was printed in 1995, and 32MB SIMMs may not have been considered.
Speaking of upgrades, there is also an extended feeder tray, similar to the one available for the HP LJ5 printers. Cost of maintenance looks reasonable, with toner life at around 2,000 pages and new toner cartridges costing around $25.00. The first toner cartridge, as usual, prints about half that. Depending on the size of your jobs, the drum has an expected life of from 12,000 to 20,000 pages. At this point I don't know what the cost of the drums are.
The manual is adequate, if not good. The documentation comes in four languages, all romance languages. The information is brief, but clear and comprehensive.
"Tied with the Lexmark for first place in text quality is the Oki OL810e/PS, no doubt due to its unique ability to print at 1,200 x 600 dpi. Although its text quality is top-drawer, the OL810e/PS scores at or near the bottom in the two graphics tests; the OL810e/PS as well as the OL610e/PS and the TI microLaser fare poorly in both these tests because of significant loss of shadow detail (in the Photoshop image) and excessive banding."
--- uk.macworld.com Sept. 96 review