By M. David Stone A close cousin to the OKI MC562w that I recently reviewed, the OKI MC362w color multifunction printer (MFP) offers most of the same features and only a little slower speed. It's meant for lighter-duty use, which makes its natural home a somewhat smaller office, in the micro- to small-office range. However it delivers enough to make it the new Editors' Choice if you need a full complement of MFP features but only light- to medium-duty printing by small-office standards.
As I discussed in the MC562w review, there are several minor differences between the two models, including the slower speed for the MC362w and the lack of a QWERTY keyboard on its front panel, a difference that makes its direct email feature a little less convenient to use than the equivalent in the OKI MC562w. However, the most important difference is in the running cost for the two models, with the OKI MC562w offering a lower cost per page.
Based on OKI's claimed yields and prices, the cost per page for the MC362w comes out to 2.8 cents for a monochrome page and 13.9 cents for a color page. The OKI MC562w can use a higher-capacity cartridge, which cuts the cost by 0.4 cents for every mono page and 1.6 cents for every color page. Print just one color page out of every 10 pages you print, and the savings works out to $52 for 10,000 pages. Print enough pages, and you can easily make up the difference in initial price with the savings in running costs using the more expensive printer.
The other way to look at those numbers is that if you don't print all that much, you'll never make up the difference in initial price. For micro offices that may print only a few hundred pages per month or even less, the MC362w will be both the cheaper printer to buy and the cheaper one to own in the long run. Yet it will give you almost all of the same MFP features as the MC562w.
Basics
As with the OKI MC562w, the MC362w is an LED printer, rather than a laser. That's almost not worth mentioning, since the two technologies are essentially identical otherwise. The only difference is that an LED printer draws the image of each page on photosensitive material with LEDs rather than with a laser.
Beyond that, the MC362w also offers the same set of core MFP features as the OKI MC562w. It can print and fax from, as well as scan to, a PC, including over a network; it can work as a standalone copier, fax machine, and email sender; and it can both scan to and print from a USB memory key.
Paper handling for printing is more than enough for most micro and small offices, with a 250-sheet drawer, a 100-sheet multi-purpose tray, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard. If you need more, you can also add a 530-sheet optional tray ($199 list) for a maximum of 880 sheets.
For scanning, you can use either the letter-size flatbed, or the 50-page automatic document feeder (ADF). As you would expect for an office-oriented model, the ADF can handle up to legal-size pages. Even better, it can also duplex, by scanning one side of a page, turning it over, and then scanning the other side. Another important plus is that unlike some MFPs with duplexing ADFs, the MC362w lets you duplex documents for faxing as well as for scanning and copying. The printer also offers menu choices to let you copy both single- and double-sided originals to your choice of single- or double-sided copies.
Like more and more recent printers, the MC362w supports mobile printing over a Wi-Fi connection from iOS devices. The printer doesn't include Wi-Fi Direct, however, which means you need a Wi-Fi access point on your network. OKI doesn't offer an app for printing from Android, Blackberry, or Windows phones or tablets. Instead, it recommends using either Cortado or ePrint by Micro Tech.
Setup and Speed
At 17.5 by 16.8 by 20 inches (HWD), the MC362w is on the large side for a micro office and is certainly too big to share a desk with comfortably. It also weighs a hefty 63 pounds, which means moving it is best considered a two-person job. Once in place, setup on a network is standard fare. For my tests , I installed the drivers on a Windows Vista system and connected to the network using the printer's Ethernet port
OKI rates the printer at 25 pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and 23 ppm for color, which is the speed you should see on text files with little to no formatting. I clocked it on our tests (using QualityLogic's hardware and software for timing), at a solid 5.9 ppm. Not surprisingly, that makes it convincingly slower than the OKI MC562w, at 6.6 ppm. It's also a touch slower than the Ricoh Aficio SP C240SF. However, it's tied with the Dell 2155cn, which it replaces as Editors' Choice.
Output Quality
The MC362w matches the OKI MC562w for output quality. That translates to it being little below par overall. However, that's mostly because of its photo quality, which won't be a serious issue for most offices.
Text quality is at the low end of the range that includes the vast majority of color laser-class MFPs. That makes it a little short of what you might want for high-end desktop publishing applications, but still more than good enough for most business needs.
Graphics output is par for a color laser-class MFP. Here again, that makes the graphics easily good enough for almost any business need, including PowerPoint handouts and the like. Depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, you may consider it good enough for material going to an important client or customer as well. Photo output is best described as newspaper quality, which makes it good enough for printing recognizable photos from Web pages or the like.
Fortunately, photo quality isn't a key issue for most offices, and any shortcoming for photos is overwhelmed by how well the printer scores in all the areas that matter more. It delivers reasonable speed and more than acceptable output quality for text and graphics, capable paper handling for both printing and scanning, and a full set of MFP capabilities including extras like direct email and a duplexing ADF. The combination adds up to an impressive printer and an easy pick for Editors' Choice.
No comments:
Post a Comment