Oki MC562dnw review

The Oki MC562dnw colour LED MFP annoyed us immediately by requiring us to enter its default administrator password before we could connect it to our wireless network. The password is buried in the MFP’s extremely comprehensive 129-page setup guide. Rather than opting for a usual default of “admin” or similar, Oki’s default password is an unguessable “aaaaaa”. Note that enabling Wi-Fi disables the MFP’s low-power sleep mode.

The five-line mono LCD display gives you access to a massive array of features, but the menu system is rather complex, particularly when compared to the streamlined touchscreen displays of many rival MFPs. Unfortunately, in a test environment packed with wireless devices using the 2.4GHz band, we found that the MC562dnw seemed to have difficulty maintaining a wireless connection, leading to slow print speeds in repeated tests. Because of this we carried out our tests using a wired network connection. The MFP also has a USB port for direct connection to a PC, but this chunky workgroup printer isn’t really the sort of thing you’d want to have sitting on your desk.

The MFP defaults to duplex printing, which saves paper. It’s quite a bit slower than simplex (single-sided) printing, though. Ten colour pages printed on five sheets of paper emerged in 1m 8s. That’s a speed of 8.8ppm, compared to a significantly faster simplex colour print speed of 19.7ppm. Mono prints came out at a quick 24.2ppm.

Mono 12pt text quality was as good as you’d expect from a laser or LED printer: sharp, dark and crisp. Even the challenging 8pt serif text in some of our mixed-colour pages looked pretty good, although close examination revealed some slightly jagged edges. The colour illustrations were pleasingly glossy and shaded areas were smooth, but the overall effect was very intense and oversaturated. This isn’t too much of a problem when it comes to graphs and diagrams but showed up badly on our photo prints. Here a black and white image looked mauve, pale skin tones looked jaundiced and a low-contrast colour image just looked rather murky.

We were pleased to find that colour copy quality was good, although again a little oversaturated. Even small text was fairly sharp in both mono and colour copies. Mono copies of images tended to be very dark, though, and suffered poor contrast even when we lightened them up. A ten-page mono copy via the surprisingly noisy ADF took 35s, while both colour and mono single-sheet copies from the platen took 14s.

Oki’s scanner interface has a pleasingly capable advanced mode, which includes options such as brightness and gamma correction and an auto-adjust option which you can apply once you’ve previewed an image. Before you can scan anything, though, you have to use the MFP’s control panel to set it to remote PC mode; this is both unexpected and slightly annoying, but you only need to set this once if you plan on doing most of your scanning from a connected computer.

Previews aren’t retained between scans, but at least settings are. Unfortunately, the 1,200dpi scanner’s quality is conspicuously poor in a number of ways. If you don’t use the auto-adjust option, which is only available for previewed scans from the platen, scans look oddly fuzzy and washed out, with soft edges on text and a loss of detailed shading. With auto-adjust enabled, you get almost the opposite problem: colours are oversaturated and everything looks unnaturally sharp. Contrast and shading are again somewhat poor. The scanner’s platen would be okay if you just needed to copy documents, but it’s also a bit slow, with a 300dpi A4 scan taking 43s. A 150dpi scan took 17s.

At £630, this MFP is expensive, but it does come with a generous 2,000 pages of both mono and colour toner. If you buy high-yield (7,000-page mono and 5,000-page colour) toner cartridges, a mono page will cost you 1.3p and a mixed-colour page 9.9p. The cost of a page goes up to 10.6p once you include the price of other consumables such as the 20,000-page drum and 60,000-page fuser unit, which very heavy users will have to consider. Our Total Cost of Ownership calculations over three years put the cost of running this MFP at a shockingly expensive £5,074 for heavy users, while its high purchase price makes it a somewhat expensive prospect for light users, too.

Although it has decent print quality for everything except photos, a clunky interface, weak scan quality and surprisingly high consumable costs make this MFP a less than compelling buy. We prefer the Xerox WorkCentre 6605DN.