Oki C110 review

Oki's C110 is a particularly inexpensive compact colour laser printer. Its specs are as modest as its price, with just a USB port, 200 sheet input tray and a conspicuously low 2,500 page maximum duty cycle – Oki recommends printing no more than 250 pages per month on a regular basis. It's small enough to fit on most desks, although it's a little noisy. Oki explicitly states that envelopes should not be used in this printer. Although lasers tend not to be best suited to envelope printing, as they heat the glue used, this warning is particularly unusual.

Installing the C110 should have been easy. Everything went without a hitch until we actually tried to print something. The driver defaults to printing on Letter sized paper, and refused to print, even when we changed the properties of our print job to A4. We solved the problem by going to the main Properties screen for the device in Windows' Printers options and changing the paper size there.

Once we'd got it working, there was little fault with the C110. It uses LED rather than traditional laser technology to transfer your page image on to the OPC drum, but this has no detrimental effect on print quality. Mono text is remarkably sharp even at small font sizes, while colour illustrations and photographs were all accurately coloured and free of banding or graininess. Print speeds were a very respectable 17ppm mono and 4.7ppm colour.

Its page costs are surprisingly low, at 2.4p per mono page, 9.2p per colour page and a total mixed-colour print cost of 11.6p. This is fantastic for a laser printer that costs just over £100. There aren't any hidden consumables, so all you have to buy are fresh 1,500 or 2,500 page toner cartridges.

If you buy high yield cartridges, you can expect to pay a total of just £424 over three years of light use. That's a total of 2,400 mono and 1,200 colour pages over the entire period; 67 mono and 33 colour pages monthly. Unfortunately, this is much more expensive than similarly priced colour lasers from Samsung and Canon. We started seeing advantages when we calculated its TCO for medium use of 500 mono and 250 colour pages, at £1,457. However, as this page count exceeds Oki's recommended 250 pages per month, we advise against buying the C110 for this level of use.

The C110 isn't up to the sort of high-volume printing that many laser devices are called up to perform, but it's great if you want to buy a personal colour laser for your small or home office without putting yourself out of pocket. If you need fast, inexpensive and pin-sharp mono text in a low-yield environment, and sometimes want the polish of vivid colour for your business documents, it's a decent budget option, despite irritating driver defaults and a lack of support for envelope printing.

Unfortunately, the real deciding factor is Oki's own recommended usage figures, which indicate that the C110 isn't up to the workload at which it would be the best value printer. Because of this, Samsung's CLP-315 is the best bet for low-yield users.