Okidata C5150 Toner
Oki C5150 Toner Cartridges

The Okidata C5150 color laser printer is designed for the home or small office user. It includes networking capabilities to easily integrate it into a small office network environment.

The OKI C5150n color laser printer is a bit of a misnomer, as the unit actually uses LED technology instead of lasers to focus laser printer toner onto the page. LED models are generally grouped with laser models, however, due to their similarities. Some of the advantages of LED printing technology include fewer moving parts, the potential for faster printing, and lower costs to manufacture.

The main advantage of this model's LED technology is speed. At 20 pages per minute in black and a whopping 12 pages per minute in color, it is very fast for the price. The unit prints from all three color cartridges in one pass, allowing for faster printing speeds. Most other models often require a separate pass for each color.

The unit ships with starter Okidata C5150 toner cartridges at half the capacity of the normal cartridges, as a cost-cutting measure. Though this lowers the upfront cost, it raises the cost of operation for the consumer. One aspect that will lower operating costs, however, is the fact that the Oki C5150 toner cartridges are separate from the imaging drums. While many models have the drum and cartridge incorporated into one unit, the drums can be replaced only when needed. In the long run, this can save quite a bit in operating costs. The full-size laser toner cartridges have a capacity of 5,000 pages, while the imaging drums are rated to last for 15,000 pages. The printer toner cartridges are very affordable, giving users a low cost per page.

Print quality is a mixed bag. Text is reasonably sharp and defined, but color prints tend to look shiny and there are a number of saturation problems and color inaccuracies. Apparently, the gains in speed come at the cost of poor print quality.

Overall, the Oki C5150 is a very fast printer, especially for color prints, but its print quality is lacking. Cost of operation is helped by the separation of toner and imaging drums, but is somewhat offset by the inclusion of starter cartridges on initial purchase.