Oki C130n review

At less than 30cm wide, the Oki is one of the smallest colour laser printers on the market. Unfortunately, it isn’t the cheapest at nearly £150 exc VAT.

That extra outlay buys you some useful workgroup features, such as a network port and a 200-sheet capacious paper tray, but the C130n’s performance suggests that busy offices should look elsewhere. It’s a four pass printer, for a start, which means the Oki’s colour performance is pretty slow at 5ppm.

Reserve it for black and white printing, though, and you’re looking at a nippy printer – we recorded 21ppm on straightforward black and white documents, and a good time to first page of 11 seconds. Print quality was consistently good, too.

It scored perfectly in our business graphics test, thanks to flawless black text and decent quality when it came to printing on coloured backgrounds.

It was also close to the best lasers we’ve seen for photographic output. The only complaint we had was when the C130n was tasked with printing fine gradients, since there was a small amount of stepping in evidence.

This makes the Oki seem very appealing, and viewed on its own it would be. It’s quiet and produces decent quality prints. However, there’s the significant question of the competition posed by other printers this month, and that’s where it comes unstuck.

For instance, its slow colour speed means it will never be a practical choice for any but the smallest workgroup, which is why the Lexmark C540n has the edge – that’s before we even consider the soaring cost of ownership of this printer.

Alternatively, it’s hard to ignore the Dell 1320cn, which is faster than the Oki despite significantly less, or the Samsung CLP-315, which is small, attractive and excellent value.

The Oki C130n is an undeniably good piece of hardware then, with stacks of features and good results in our tests, but it isn’t quite as good as its main competitors where it counts.