Oki MC562dnw review

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.