Okidata C5100 Toner
Oki C5100 Toner Cartridges

The Okidata C5100 color laser printer is designed for the home or small office user. Its main strength is speed, especially for color prints, but its print quality is somewhat lacking. For a higher-quality unit, look at the LaserJet 3550 toner printer.

The Oki C5100n color laser printer has a fairly compact design, allowing it to fit into smaller spaces, though it is probably to bulky to share a desk with a computer for personal use. The front panel includes a two-line LCD for displaying information, and an array of buttons to interact with the onscreen menus. It has a 300 sheet main paper tray, and a 100 sheet multipurpose tray. If this is not enough capacity, an additional tray may be added later to increase the total capacity to 930 sheets, allowing the unit to expand along with a growing office.

The machine incorporates a single-pass color printing engine. While many laser models must pass the print heads over the page once for each color, this model can print all colors in one pass, significantly reducing print time. Color pages print at a rate of about 12 pages per minute in color. Black printing rates are about 20 pages per minute. These speeds are much faster than the competing Dell 3100cn toner printer.

Printing costs are surprisingly low, at around 2 cents per page for black, and 8 cents per page for color, since Okidata C5100 toner cartridges are very affordable, and have large capacities. Color laser toner cartridges have a high capacity of 5,000 pages, as does the single black printer toner cartridge.

All of the unit's good points seem to come at a cost, however, as its print quality is below average. Text quality is generally good, but color prints are a mixed bag. Many color prints exhibit inaccurate colors and saturation problems, and color ink tends to look glossy, which may be distracting for some.

Overall, the Oki C5100 is a very economical color laser printer, though if a smaller model is desired, there is always the HP CP2025 toner printer. Its fast speeds, especially for color, and its lower per-page costs make it an appealing choice, but it's below average print quality makes it difficult to recommend.