Kyocera 2160 - page 35

well as with PCL.

Overall, this product family offers good value that

matches or exceeds that of most other printers in its

league. It’s remarkable that unlike a few years ago, we

can choose between a wealth of reasonably high-per-

formance printers with decent features at such moderate

prices. In that group, these OKI models stand out.

Chart entries — pages 102–103

OKI Printing Solutions C9600n

OKI Printing Solutions C9600hdn

OKI Printing Solutions C9800hn

OKI Printing Solutions C9800hdn

36ppm full color

40ppm black & white

Sum-up: A ledger-size color printer series with superior speed

and good features.

These ledger-size printers are the successors to OKI

Printing Solutions’ excellent C9300 and C9500 printers,

which had a strong track record. The models are faster,

among the fastest printers we cover in this guide.In addi-

tion, they have a number of productivity-enhancing fea-

tures that make them useful in office environments.

We’ve discussed (above) in some detail the single-pass

LED technology that OKI uses on its machines. OKI

Printing Solutions has managed to take that technology

and speed it up considerably with this product family.

Above all, it is speed that makes this series stand out. It

was considered a breakthrough not long ago to print

color pages at anything faster than 6 pages per minute.

And you had to pay a big premium for that speed. The

few really fast machines were derived from copiers and

cost over four times as much as regular color printers.

Now OKI Printing Solutions offers a family of color

printers that print at 36ppm in color and 40ppm in black-

and-white. With street prices in the $3,400–$7,200 range,

these models aren’t the cheapest,but they are priced com-

petitively for what you get.

The C9600/C9800 series is made up of four models.

They are:

lThe C9600n ($3,399 street), which is the base model.

It has 256MB of memory, a 720MHz processor, and

standard networking.

lThe C9600hdn ($4,009), which starts with 324MB of

memory and a hard disk and duplexing.

lThe C9800hn ($6,889), which comes with 1GB of

memoryand a hard disk but no automatic duplexing.

lThe C9800hdn ($7,189), which adds duplexing.

All of the models come standard with parallel, USB,

and Ethernet interfaces, and they all offer Wi-Fi connec-

tivity as well. They all support PCL 5e and PostScript 3

printing. Like many current printers, they can be man-

aged remotely over the Internet.

The one-year on-site warranty is typical, and the LED

printhead is guaranteed for five years. All four models

output print at 1,200 x 600dpi resolution. They all have a

monthly duty cycle of 150,000 pages.

The two hdn models come standard with a 20GB hard

disk. While they can be used to store frequently run

images or jobs, they are most useful for electronic colla-

tion of very long jobs, especially when the full job can’t

be maintained in memory. A 20GB hard disk is more

than enough capacity.

Paper handling: Paper handling is quite good on this

family,especially on the input side. First, the printers can

handle ledger- and tabloid-size paper along with legal-

and letter-size pages. The base model has a 650-sheet

standard paper capacity, which is based on a 550-sheet

paper tray.That’s convenient because you can put in a

full 500-sheet ream with ease,even when there are a few

sheets remaining in the drawer. It also has a 100-sheet

multipurpose tray (which handles letter-size sheets only

but can be used for transparencies and other nonstandard

materials). You can add two 550-sheet trays or one 1,590-

sheet tray to all four models; the C9600hdn offers the

additional option of a 1,650-sheet tray. There are other

Better Buys for Business

OKI C9600/C9800

Consumables costs at-a-glance

Price

Yield

Full-color cost per page

Black-and-whitecost per page

Black toner $110.00 15,000 $ 0.007 $ 0.007

Cyan toner $380.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Magenta toner $380.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Yellow toner $380.00 15,000 $ 0.025 N/A

Drum/black $145.00 42,000 $ 0.003 $ 0.003

Drums (3)/3-color $597.00 32,000 $ 0.019 N/A

Transfer belt $220.00 100,000 $ 0.002 $ 0.002

Fuser kit $179.00 100,000 $ 0.002 $ 0.002

TOTAL PER-PAGE COSTS

$0.1094 $ 0.0148

10.94 1.48