The OKI B412dn ($199) is the sort of compact but powerful beast that’s small enough to share a desk with, but capable enough to serve as a shared printer. Built around an LED engine—which means it substitutes LEDs for a laser as its light source—it’s technically not a laser printer, but it uses the same technology otherwise, which is why most people don’t draw a distinction between LED and laser printers. More important, compared head-to-head with actual laser printers, it can be an attractive choice.
The B412dn$190.00 at Amazon is a close competitor in many ways to the Brother HL-5450DN$142.47 at Amazon, which is our Editors’ Choice moderate- to heavy-duty monochrome laser for personal use or for shared printing in a micro office or workgroup. In particular, it offers slightly better paper handling. Both printers come with a 250-sheet paper tray and duplexer (for two-sided printing) standard. Both also include a multipurpose tray. However, the B412dn’s tray holds 100 sheets rather than 50.
The paper capacity for either printer should be sufficient for most offices, but the extra capacity for the B412dn is a welcome convenience. For those offices that need more, both printers also offer an additional tray. Here again, the B412dn offers a little extra, with its 530-sheet tray ($229) boosting the capacity from 350 sheets to a maximum 880 sheets. The Brother HL-5450’s maximum is 800 sheets.
Basics, Setup, and Speed
As tested, the only connection choices for B412dn are USB and Ethernet, although a Wi-Fi module ($75) is also available. Mobile printing support includes printing through the cloud—assuming the printer is on a network, and the network is connected to the Internet. It also includes connecting though an access point on the network to print from an iOS or Android smartphone or tablet. However, the Wi-Fi module does not offer Wi-Fi Direct or the equivalent, which means that if you chose to connect to a PC via USB cable instead of connecting to a network, you won’t be able to take advantage of mobile printing.
Setup is standard fare. The printer is small enough to find room for easily, at 9.6 by 15.2 by 14.3 inches (HWD), and it weighs just 26 pounds 8 ounces. For my tests, I connected it using its Ethernet port and installed the driver on a system running Windows Vista.
OKI rates the B412dn at 35 pages per minute (ppm), which is the speed you should see when printing a text document or other file that needs little to no processing. On our business applications suite, I clocked it (using QualityLogic’s hardware and software for timing) at an effective 9.6ppm. That’s acceptably fast for the price and engine speed, but is a touch slower than the Brother HL-5450DN, at 10.8ppm. It’s also slower than the less-expensive Canon imageClass LBP6230dw$99.99 at Amazon in the Canon printer’s default duplex mode, at 10.8ppm, and a lot slower than the Canon printer in simplex (one-sided) mode, at 13.2ppm.
Output Quality and Running Costs
Output quality for the B412dn earns the same general description as its speed: more than acceptable overall, but not impressive.
Text quality in my tests was just a touch below par for a monochrome laser, but not in a way that will matter for most business use. With small font sizes, the strokes were so thin that the text looked gray rather than black, making it hard to read. At 8 points and above, however, almost every font we test with was highly readable and easily good enough for most purposes short of high-quality desktop publishing. As long as you don’t need small fonts, you shouldn’t have a problem.
Graphics and photo quality are both typical for a monochrome laser. For graphics, that translates to being easily good enough for any internal business use. Unless you have a particularly critical eye, you’ll probably 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.
One final strong point for the B412dn is its running cost, at a claimed 1.9 cents per page. That’s about the same as the claimed cost for the Brother HL-5450DN, but a lot cheaper than the cost for most printers in this price range. The more pages you print, the more this can save you. The Canon LBP6230dw’s claimed cost, for example, is 4.1 cents per page, with the 2.2 cent per page difference working out to $22 for 1,000 pages.
If you print few enough pages so you don’t have to consider running cost, you may prefer the Canon LBP6230dw to the OKI B412dn because of its faster speed. However, if you print enough for the cost per page to matter, either the B412dn or the Brother HL-5450DN will be far less expensive in the long run. Between them, the Brother printer offers faster speed and better text quality, which keeps it firmly in place as our Editors’ Choice. That said, if the B412dn’s speed and text quality are good enough for your purposes, its slightly lower claimed cost per page and its slightly better paper handling may make it the better fit.
original article
