Okidata C5500 Toner
Oki C5500 Toner Cartridges

The Okidata C5500 color laser printer combines high quality printing, choice of standard or high yield toner cartridges and built-in networking capabilities. It has virtually every feature an office environment would need, but skimps on a few details, such as a standard duplexer.

The Oki C5500 color laser printer is also known as the C5500n. Print speed is solid, at 18 pages per minute black and around 13 pages per minute in color. Print quality is quite good, with black text very sharp and dark. Colors can be a little inaccurate, but this is typical of many color lasers. The control panel is functional, but very basic. This is not particularly a downside, as most options can be easily accessed and easily understood.

A built-in ethernet port is included for easily sharing across a network. The built-in port eliminates the need for a host PC to share the printer on the network, resulting in lower power consumption.

The unit comes with one black and three color Okidata C5500 toner cartridges with a capacity of 2,000 pages each. High capacity laser toner cartridges are available with a capacity of 5,000 pages each. Using the high-capacity printer toner cartridges, costs per page come to around 2.3 cents for black and 12 cents for color pages. This is about average for a color laser, though some Okidata toner models can be less expensive per page.

The machine supports both Windows PCs and Macs, a welcome feature as Macs are becoming increasingly common in the workplace. Setup is a breeze, simply running the software installation, plugging in the unit, and following the onscreen prompts. If you run into trouble, OKI offers 24/7 support by phone and email, and the one year warranty includes overnight shipping of a replacement unit for defective units.

Overall, the Okidata C5500 is a good choice for small and medium office environments who need a model that can handle a high volume of printing. Lack of duplexing may be an issue for a small number of buyers, but an optional duplexer is available for an extra cost. The Oki C5200 toner printer is a slightly more affordable model with a few less features if price is an issue.