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Entire Contents © 2006 Prog
ressiv
e Business Pub
lications
.
Copying of Pages Prohibited.To Order: 800 247 2185 or www.betterbuys.com
well as with PCL.
Overall, this product family offers good value that
m
atches 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 (abo
ve) 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 pa
ges at anything faster than 6 pages per minute.
And y
ou 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-w
hite
. 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:
● The C9600n ($3,399 street), which is the base model.
It has 256MB of memory, a 720MHz processor, and
standard networking.
● The C9600hdn ($4,009), which starts with 324MB of
memory and a hard disk and duplexing.
● T
he C9800hn ($6,889),
w
hich comes with 1GB of
memor
y and a har
d disk b
ut no automa
tic duplexing.
● The 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.
T
he tw
o hdn models come standar
d with a 20GB har
d
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.
P
a
per handling:
P
a
per handling is quite g
ood on this
family, especially on the input side. First, the printers can
handle ledg
er- 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
pa
per tr
a
y
.
T
hat’s convenient because you can put in a
full 500-sheet r
eam with ease
,
e
ven 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 tr
a
y to all f
our 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-white cost 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