Okidata C5150N LED Color Printer

Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT customer/tech support and EXCELLENT printer!
Review: Everything about this printer is VERY good - quality, speed, ease of use.
However, just be careful when you change cartridge -- it can get messy and the printer is very sensitive to cleaniness! I had problems changing cartridge twice that I needed to call tech support. Both times, I received EXCELLENT support service -- detail, no waiting, responsive, professional.


Rating:
Summary: Great Color Printer For The Price
Review: I bought this printer to replace my older Minolta color laser printer for several reasons, the most important being that the Okidata will do a maximum of 12 color ppm vs. the Minolta's 4 color ppm. You just can't get better than this for the price.

The color photos are pretty good but I have a good high quality color injet photo printer. For everything else I use this one now. Color printing is cheaper than inkjet printers over the long run. It has built-in networking and setup over my wifi was snap!

I'm pretty happy with it but there are just a few things about it that I do not like. They are:

1. You have to set the multi-purpose manually. Most printers will print whatever is on the MP tray first but this one doesn't. Of course, it could be my mistake.

2. The MP tray is kind of tricky to pull out and use. For one thing, there is a large lever that one would assume is the MP tray but is really the release lever for the top of the printer to do things like remove paper jams and which gives you access to all of the toners. You actually have to grip the MP tray on both sides and pull down. Then you have to pull part of it out towards you and then pull out the extension. Before you close it, you have to basically fold back up the MP tray.

3. There is no default black and white print setting. You have to set it on grayscale.

Apart from these little irritations, it's a very good printer and I would recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Very Happy with Printer
Review: I did a lot of research on color laser printers and chose the Okidata because it said it did heavy cardstock, which I print on a lot. I have been very pleased w/the printer. Its been 2 months and I just replaced the black cartridge, the colors are still the starter cartridges. I've printed a lot of color flyers and letterhead for my business and it prints great! The only thing I find frustrating is if I change media (which I go from envelopes to greeting cards to letter and legal size paper) I have to manually hit the online button when the printer default media size doesn't match the file media size for it to print from the Manual Feed Tray. My HP laser automatically prints from the MF tray if the types don't match. It may just be operator error, but I have to change the default print settings in the control panel everytime I work with different media so I can print several files and walk away and know I don't have to sit and hit the online button for each file. But I've no complaint other than that, I love the print texture, its much richer than my HP, slightly glossy, which looks more formal on my envelopes and cards. Very little offsetting (I actually haven't noticed any yet), which was also a problem w/my HP. I would definitely recommend this printer!

Rating:
Summary: User Review of the Okidata 5150 Color Laser Printer
Review: Prior to purchasing the Okidata 5150N color laser printer, my wife and I spent several hours on the web searching for user reviews of color laser printers. Based on only a few user reviews (all positive) of the Okidata 5150N color laser printer, we purchased this printer. We are delighted that we made the purchase. This printer takes the place of Epson inkjet printers that were continually suffering clogged heads if not used for a week or so and for which purchasing the inkjet cartridges was a frequent and expensive necessity.

From the moment we arrived home with our Okidata 5150N the entire experience of unpacking it and installing it has been a pleasure because of the care and attention to detail shown by Okidata in their packing of the printer and in the clear installation instructions which they provide (with separate manuals in six different languages!). We had our color laser unpacked, hooked up, and printing within 20 minutes. Installation of the drivers and other software provided on three CD's by Okidata with the printer was fast and straightforward. The printer was installed on a USB 2.0 hub attached to a P4 running Windows XP Pro SP2. By installing the Okidata drivers for the 5150N on our other two networked computers, we were quickly able to begin using the printer on those computers as well. Note that the 5150N also comes complete with an ethernet print server as well which is rare for a color laser printer in this price range.

We have been extremely pleased with the speed and quality of the prints made on the 5150N. This includes both text, business color graphics including web pages, and color photos printed on Hammermill laser photo paper. While Okidata thoughtfully provides a utility for color matching which is useful in printing photos, I have found that the auto color setting of the 5150N also does an excellent job on photos as well as everything else. In fact, the Okidata 5150N does almost as good a job with photos as my Canon i9900 photo inkjet printer which I believe represents the current state-of-the-art in consumer level inkjet photo printers.

If you are used to printing large jobs of many pages on an inkjet printer, you will be really impressed with the speed of the 5150N. My 5150N is in Power Save mode (using 20 watts only) for most of the time since it is used only occasionally by my wife and I for print jobs, but the first page rolls out in about 20 seconds after clicking on print on our computers and the speed with which the remaining pages appear is a joy to behold. We anticipate that the cost per page of using the 5150N will be significantly less than that of using any inkjet printer.

The physical size of the 5150N is noteworthy and a clear level desk space area is necessary for locating the printer. The construction quality of the printer is first rate, and the printer driver provided by Okidata is straight forward, includes lots of features for enhancing printing, and runs flawlessly.

We have now printed several hundred pages of images, graphics, and text on several different weights of paper without a single paper jam or other problems.

I highly recommend this printer to anyone considering the purchase of a color laser writer.