Although technically not a laser printer—because it uses LEDs instead of a laser to draw the image of each page on its drum—the OKI B432dn ($349) uses the same technology otherwise, putting it firmly in the monochrome laser category for all practical purposes. Beyond that, its strong points include both its level of paper handling and its low running cost. The combination will make it of particular interest to small offices with both heavy-duty print needs and an appreciation of how spending just a little less on each printed page can add up to big savings in the long run.
The advantage of the B432dn’s 1.6 cents-per-page running cost will vary depending on how much you print and what printer you’re using for the comparison. The OKI B412dn$190.00 at Amazon, for example, also has a low running cost for its price. However, the printer itself is $150 less than the B432dn, and its claimed running cost is 0.3 cents her per page .
The difference works out to $30 for 10,000 pages. Print 50,000 pages with both printers over their lifetimes, and the total cost of ownership will be the same in both cases. Every 10,000 pages beyond that translates to a $30 savings for the B432dn. Run the same calculation with the Brother HL-5450DN$142.47 at Amazon and the advantage for the B432dn is even greater. The difference in initial price is smaller and the savings in running cost is bigger, at $50 for every 10,000 pages.
Basics
Complementing the B432dn’s low running cost is paper handling that’s suitable for heavy-duty printing in a micro office. The printer comes with a 250-sheet drawer, 100-sheet multipurpose tray, and a duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard. If you need more, you can boost the capacity to 880 sheets with an optional 530-sheet tray ($229).
Going a little beyond the basics, the B432dn adds mobile printing support. If you connect to a network with either Ethernet or with the optional Wi-Fi module ($75), you can print from an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet by connecting through an access point on your network. You can also print though the cloud. However, the Wi-Fi option does not support Wi-Fi Direct or the equivalent, which means that if you connect to a single PC via USB cable rather than to your network, you can’t connect directly with mobile devices.
One other feature worth noting is support for PostScript, a printer language that most offices can do without, but some applications require.
Setup and Speed
The B432dn weighs 26 pounds 8 ounces and measures 9.6 by 15.2 by 14.3 inches (HWD), making it small and light enough for one person to move into place. Setup is typical for a monochrome laser. For my tests, I connected it to a network using its Ethernet port and installed the driver on a Windows Vista system.
OKI rates the printer engine at 42 pages per minute (ppm), which is close to the speed you should see when printing a file that needs little to no processing. However, the effective speed can be much slower, depending on how many pages are in the print job.
Results on our tests are usually significantly slower than the engine rating, both because most of our test files include graphics and photos that require processing, and because we time what’s known as throughput, which includes the time between giving the print command and the first page starting to print. Engine ratings don’t include that time. Even after taking this into account, however, the B432dn was slow for both its price and its rating on our tests.
The reason for the slow performance is that the B432dn takes more time than most of the competition to warm up at the start of a print job. For long documents, the fast speed once printing actually begins will largely make up for the slow start. However, our tests consist of one to four-page documents, because most offices print far more short documents than long ones.
I timed the printer on our business applications suite (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing) at only 6.8ppm. In comparison, the OKI B412dn came in at 9.6ppm, the Brother HL-5450DN managed 10.8ppm, and the much-less-expensive Canon imageClass LBP6230dw$99.99 at Amazon hit 10.8ppm in its default duplex mode and 13.2ppm in simplex (one-sided) mode. The best that can be said of the B432dn’s speed for short print jobs is that it’s tolerable, but sluggish. The good news is that with substantially longer documents, the slow warm-up time won’t be as significant a drag on the overall print time.
Output Quality
Output quality overall is more than acceptable, particularly for text, which is easily good enough for almost any business need short of high-quality desktop publishing. Unless you make extensive use of small font sizes, you shouldn’t have a problem with it.
Graphics and photo quality are both typical for a monochrome laser. The graphics output is easily good enough for any internal business use, and most people would consider it good enough for PowerPoint handouts and the like as well. Photo quality is good enough to print recognizable images from photos on Web pages.
If you won’t be printing enough for the B432dn’s low cost per page to be a key consideration, you might be better off with the OKI B412dn, which offers the same paper handling plus faster throughput for short print jobs. Also consider the Brother HL-5450DN. In addition to offering nearly the same level of paper handling, the Brother model delivers better text quality than the B432dn, which helps make it our Editors’ Choice moderate- to heavy-duty monochrome laser for personal use or for shared printing in a micro office or workgroup.
If your print needs are heavy-duty enough, the OKI B432dn’s low running cost can save money in the long run compared with less expensive printers with higher running costs. And if most of the documents you print are long enough for the fast engine speed to make up for the slow warm-up time, it can even be a compelling choice.
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