Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this printer after a search for an ideal color laser printer for home. My wife needs to print in color for her cirriculum and I need to print on both sides of the page to save weight when sending out mailings. This printer does both and does them both well.
In case this is your first time to the rodeo, LED printers are like laser printers, but instead of using a laser beam and a mirror, there is a fixed array of LEDs which perform the same function. The claim is that this will reduce maintenance, but I have never heard of anyone claiming "well, my laser printer was great, but then the laser died." or "well, if only the mirror assembly hadn't broken in my laser printer..." - no, usually it's something to do with the drum, the fuser, constant jams, toner costs, etc. So I'm not sure LED printers are better than laser printers, but I took the plunge anyway.
So, about this printer. So it uses a grid of LEDs. In practice, the resolution is a little worse than a laser printer, but 600x1200 dpi is plenty respectable for print work. I haven't even considered the resolution at any point in operating it.
The paper passes through a singular path, meaning that it doesn't really change print speed based on whether it's b/w or color, which is nice. I was surprised to print a full-page color photo in the same time it takes to print a text file. Generally speaking, that's not common (try that on an inkjet!)
The printer comes with 1000-page toner cartridges, which are "starter" sized. Price per page is not significantly cheaper than an inkjet, after you factor in the costs of toner, but I've always found inkjet printers to be frustrating to deal with, for print speed, frequency of ink changes, dried cartridge nozzles, noisy feed/print mechanisms, and so on. So, this is a lot better than an inkjet in my book, but not for economy printing.
The duplexing is the standard "cheaper" method that requires the page to partially come out of the printer, then it sucks it back in for a second go-round. Nicer workgroup printers keep the document entirely internalized until it has printer on both sides. Still, it works fine and there's plenty of room for it to do its thing and keep all the pages in order. It's a great feature to have when you need it.
The color quality isn't as good as an inkjet. If you want to print photos, you really would be better off simply ordering them online (just upload your jpegs, and so on) and getting them printed on $20,000+ professional printers for pennies. I think a 4x6 photo print is less than 10 cents, so buying an inkjet is just a waste of time in my book. Anyway, this printer is acceptable for all display/presentation work. It's just not color accurate. They package software to attempt to correct the color, but this is unlikely to get it to "professional photo printer" levels anyway.
Black and white is great, as it should be. No complaints there.
No paper jams to report, and the whole printer seems easy to clear if there was a problem.
There is no wireless networking, only a 100mbit (no gigabit, but why would you need it?) ethernet port and a USB port.
Networking is simple and you can point a browser to the IP address to get status and even submit jobs manually if you don't have a print driver installed (it lets you upload a pdf and print it out). Having a networked printer is great so you don't need to have a computer on (though mine is on all the time anyway) if you want others to have access to printing.
Power consumption is like other laser printers. It's significant when warming up, not too bad when printing, and very low when idle. Warm up time is only a few seconds, which is great.
The printer is a bit heavy/bulky, but it's about the size of a larger all-in-one fax/copy/print machine (though it doesn't fax/copy). It weighs about 55lbs.
Overall, I'd give it 5 stars. It fit my needs perfectly.
Click Here to see more reviews about:
C330DN Digital Colorprinter 23/25PPM, 12Okidata C330DN LED Printer - Color - Plain Paper Print - Desktop 62435103 749
Get 4% OFF
Click here for more information about C330DN Digital Colorprinter 23/25PPM, 12
