Oki MC562dnw review

Businesses wanting to see the big picture will love Oki’s LED printing technology. It uses fewer moving parts than a laser and the flat paper path in the MC562dnw allows it to handle heavier 220gsm media and print banners up to 1.32m in length. See also: What’s the best injet printer for professionals?

To realise your banner headlines, you open up the front multipurpose tray and rear output slot to allow a clear run straight through the printer. It works well. Another plus point is that the MC562dnw delivers the characteristic vibrancy and high levels of detail we’ve seen with other Oki colour LED printers.

Text quality, even at the smallest sizes, is pin-sharp, while colour photos and graphics are punchy, with excellent contrast and detail. Oki’s PS3 driver produces vibrant colours, although our performance chart showed it up as a tad overenthusiastic with magenta, leaving a slight pink tinge to mono photos.

The driver’s Photo Enhance setting delivers improvements in quality, upping the sharpness and contrast, and as a result giving colour photos real depth. Just note that one of the few drawbacks of LED printing is a perceptible cross-hatch effect evident in large areas of single colours.

The MC562dnw’s printing costs are a little high. The four high-yield cartridges, drum, belt and fuser combine to deliver a mono page for 1.7p and colour for just under 9p.

It can’t be faulted for performance, however, with a 30-page Word document whizzing through on both Standard and Enhanced driver settings in 59 seconds. The Oki also shrugged off our 24-page DTP colour test, returning it at 26.5ppm, at both high-resolution and top 2,400dpi ProQ settings.

The scanner also performs well, with colour copies of a glossy magazine cover looking close to the original. Its ADF kept up the good work, with a 15-page copy timed at 22ppm, while a duplex-to-duplex copy managed 6ppm.

The printer’s basic web interface isn’t as well featured as the TopAccess version on Oki’s B700 Series of LED printers. General printer settings such as wired or wireless operations can be set up from here, but no options are provided for controlling user access to print, scan and copy functions.

LDAP support allowed us to use the printer’s mono LCD control panel to search our Active Directory server for email addresses to use as scan destinations. The search process is made easier by the full Qwerty keyboard lurking beneath the printer’s flip-up job macro panel.

Cloud services are thin on the ground: only Google Print is supported. AirPrint is enabled out of the box and we experienced no issues using it with our iPad 4; however, note that the Oki-recommended ePrint app from Microtech isn’t free.

We used Oki’s Configuration Tool to remotely manage the printer’s list of fax speed-dials and email addresses. We also created profiles defining scanning destinations for network shares, plus FTP and HTTP servers. The MC562dnw comes as standard with a 4GB SDHC memory card installed. This is accessed from the Storage Manager desktop plugin, where we viewed its contents and uploaded custom fonts and forms.

PCs running Oki’s ActKey utility automatically become remote scan destinations that can be accessed from the printer’s control panel. After defining ActKey applications, a scan folder or a PC-Fax destination, we could send scanned images directly to any of these locations.

Oki’s MC562dnw’s LED engine delivers top-quality colour prints. It has a good turn of speed, but its above-average running costs and minimal cloud service support stop us short of recommending it.