Oki MC561 Color Laser MFP Review: Fast, Fully Equipped, Affordable

At a Glance

Skilful's Rating

Pros

Convoluted network scanning setup
Superior textual matter output
Very fast

Cons

Ordinary graphics and scan quality

Our Verdict

Workgroups will like this modelling's speed and paper handling, but its output quality and ease of use can be unsatisfying.

Oki Printing Solutions' MC561 color laser multifunction pressman is well equipped for a busy workgroup, with rumbling mark/copy/scan/facsimile features, outstanding speed, and superior textbook quality. Artwork quality inhumane brusque of my expectations, yet, and Oki still has a lot to learn about relieve of use. Among MFPs at roughly the same price as the MC561 ($750 as of June 29, 2020), the somewhat less expensive Brother MFC-9970CDW is a bit slower but offers same operating theatre better features–and major graphics quality.

If it weren't for small-scale differences in colouring and the nameplate, you wouldn't be capable narrate the MC561 from its marginally slower first cousin, the Oki MC361. Their feature sets are virtually identical, with five-line, 3.5-inch, tilting monochrome LCDs and well-labeled controls. What you pay unnecessary for is the MC561's superior speed. In our tests, plain-text pages written at a platte-setting 17.6 pages per minute on the PC and an sensational 15.4 ppm on the Macintosh. Photos arrived quickly, too: Snapshots on plain or bright paper emerged in 20 to 27 seconds, and a squeaky-resolving, full-varlet photo on the Mac took just over a minute to print.

Completely written output from the MC561 bears a slight sheen. You mightiness be a fan of this effect, or you might not; it's a matter of taste. Patina or no, text pages from this whole looked clear and sharp. Photos, on the other hand were merely adequate, with a clear (though not unacceptably obvious) graininess. Copies of anything other than school tex looked grainy, too. Scans were satisfactory: Line-art samples showed few moiré, while color images tended to be overly dark.

The MC561's theme-treatment features are unadulterated. Duplexing (the ability to handle two-sided documents) is standard for impression, as well as for scanning and copying via the 50-tack automatic papers feeder (ADF). The front fold-down multipurpose tray holds 100 sheets, the main composition cassette accommodates 250 sheets, and the output tray can hold 150 sheets.

One area where the MC561 (and most other Oki multifunction printers we've tested, alas) badly needs to improve is in ease of setup and employment. In the PC instalmen (via USB or ethernet), you have to install the PaperPort 11 SE and the OmniPage 16 scanning/document management applications separately. Network scanning is unduly complex, requiring the use of an inadequately documented form joyride. Mac users don't get on the same OCR/document software listed higher up, and they undergo to download a unaccompanied device driver to get the electronic scanner to come along in System PreferencePrinters and Faxes or to use the image scanner with OS X's scanning app.

Oki's estimated retail toner prices would yield middling costs per page. The standard-size up supplies let in a 3500-page black toner cartridge for $97.60, which works out to a slightly lower-than-mediocre 2.8 cents per page. Unfortunately, toner cartridges for each of the triplet colors (cyan, magenta, and icteric) cost $146.30 and next-to-last for 3000 pages; that works stunned to 4.9 cents per Thomas Nelson Page, which is a bit higher than average. If you combine all four colors, the price per page jumps to 17.4 cents, higher than it should be for a busy workgroup printer. The fruitful supplies follow the same veer: The 5000-page bootleg cartridge ($105) delivers a good cost per page of 2.1 cents, but the 5000-page color cartridges ($212 each) are a little pricey at 4.2 cents per page to each one, directional to a higher-than-middling cost per page of 14.8 cents for quartet-color pages. If you shop around (as we did), you can find toner for the MC561 at discounts of busy 40 percentage.

Oki charges a lot for its DIMM retention upgrades, also: $168 for 256MB, and $233 for 512MB. Standard memory DIMMs deal out for a fraction of that price. If you always replace the image thrum, which lasts for 20,000 pages, the $166 successor split up volition minimal brain dysfunction about three-quarters of a cent to the cost per page of future pages.

The Oki MC561 has much to advocate it–starting with race, but with price and paper handling following close behind. Artwork prime is unnoticeable but probably unexceptionable for mainstream business use. We'd like it improve if it were easier to put together, merely it's distillery an option worth considering among midpriced MFPs.