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Okidata's C7350n is among the smaller and lighter corporate color lasers we reviewed for the February issue, at 16.9 by 24.4 by 16.9 inches and 105 pounds. And at $1984, it's also among the least expensive.
For the relatively affordable price, you get surprisingly good print quality. None of the corporate color lasers we tested printed text badly, and the C7350n had the same fine, sharp text as others in its class. Narrow lines looked clean and straight, except at the thinnest points (which suffered slightly by comparison). Grayscale graphics looked smooth, though the lighter sections appeared washed out. Color images showed good skin tones and contrast, but we found blues and blacks too dark.
The C7350n hit both ends of the speed spectrum, garnering the second-fastest speed score for text at a blazing 20.4 pages per minute and the slowest score (by a fairly large margin) for color images at just 2.4 ppm in our tests. Its graphics speed makes the C7350n look more like a swift inkjet than an office-oriented color laser.
Okidata offers somewhat fewer paper-handling options for the C7350n relative to what we saw for the other models reviewed this month. The printer can accept up to legal-size paper and comes with two standard trays that hold a total of 630 sheets. Two optional trays ($397) boost the maximum number of sheets to 1690. You can expand the standard 192MB of RAM to 1GB (twice the capacity of competing models we looked at). No hard disk is available currently, though Okidata says it will release one in March 2005.
Upshot: Workgroups that print mainly text and need a small printer might consider the Okidata C7350n.
Lisa Cekan
