Original Toners

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1500 page toners

3000 page toners

Drum

Spares

OKI C3100 Colour Laser Printer

A4 colour LED electrophotography printers with colour print speeds of 12 pages per minute for colour and 20ppm for mono print.

These printers were introduced in 2004 as a more affordable (lower cost) version of the C5100 engine. The noticeable change is that it does without and LCD control panel - pushbuttons and flashy lights are all you get - which means you need the user guide when you get a problem.

The C3100 innards were cut down as well. Communication is USB only with no network option. (Obviously you could use a Windows share with the usual reservations about that). The printer language is a "Windows host based printing system" - although a Linux driver emerged for this type of OKI machine. The printer doesn't support the expansion options of its larger brothers either, but a memory upgrade was available.

A strong selling point was that it was quite fast for the time - a lot of other printers from Minolta, Brother and HP were using carousel-based multi-pass technology with four toner developers sharing a drum. These machines have a line of four toner-developer-drum units imaging onto the page as it passes underneath on a transfer belt.

These printers are all going to be more than a decade old now. As we frequently point out there is not much wrong with old printers. It is usually helpful to keep computers up to date because recent software often is easier to use. But if a printer still does it's job there is no massive advantage to replacing it. In fact there is a potential disadvantage; in the first couple of years there won't be any compatible or refill toners for a new printer.

Main features of the OKI C3100 Colour Laser Printer

• 12 pages per minute (ppm) Colour
• 20 ppm mono print speed
• 32MB RAM (Max 288MB)
• Straight paper path for fewer paper jams
• Paper weights up to 203gsm
• 300 sheet paper tray
• 100 sheet multipurpose/manual feed tray
• 3000 page toner capacity with easy change toner
• Auto colour balance
• Banner and sign printing up 1.2m

Duty Cycle:

35,000 pages/month

The engine probably merits a high duty cycle as it was developed for a larger machine. In practice if you wanted to print more than a thousand pages per month the economics of buying cartridges would point to buying a bigger machine.

Print Speed:

• Upto 20ppm Black
• Upto 12ppm Colour

The print mechanism uses a succession of four toners and drums organised over a transfer belt. The four colours are those used in all colour printing -( the CMYK process gives brighter print than the RGB used for screens would). Sheets of paper are fed into the front of the printer and go down the belt getting an appropriate pattern from each drum. As paper leaves the belt it goes through the fuser and either into the face-up or face down tray.

The unusual feature of these printers is the LED printhead. Laser printers scan the drum using a single flashing laser that scans the page via a spinning polygon mirror. In early printers these were an issue, so OKI replaced them with a row of 5000+ LEDs in a solid state printhead.

The LED printheads are reliable and somewhat smaller than Laser-scanners. It looks like a big change but actually isn't. A failed LED will create a white line down the page but clean the printhead first - Oki ship a cleaner with consumables. The LED heads actually do seem to be very reliable

Print Resolution:

1200 x 600 dpi

The 600 dpi resolution is set by the number of LEDs across the head.

Paper Handling:

Internal tray capacity (tray 1) & paper weight: 300 sheets, 80gsm

Paper size (any tray): A4, A5, B5, A6 (tray 1 only), Legal13, Legal13.5, Legal14, Letter, Executive

Multi-purpose tray: Max capacity 100 sheets of 80gsm paper. Paper sizes: A4, A5, B5, A6, C5, DL, Com-9, Com-10, Monarch, Custom Size (up to 1200mm length), Legal 13, Legal 13.5, Legal 14, Letter, Executive

Multi-purpose paper weight: 75 & 203gsm

Paper output: 250 sheets face down, 100 sheets face up 80gsm

These printers use what OKI call a "Windows host based printing system", sometimes described as "GDI print"

Host-based print is non standard and could be a nuisance, it probably has not been in the past with these printers but may be now.

Computers tell the printer what to do, - obviously. The difference with host-based print is that the computer does all the work and transfers the individual dots of the page to the printer as a compressed bitmap. This puts more load on the user computer and results in a bigger data transfer - though rarely anything a user computer or modern network won't take in it's stride.

Host based print works perfectly well with print -drivers for the operating system. However as operating systems move on it is no surprise if printer brands do not update their drivers for older machines - after all they have enough to do and don't necessarily want to keep ancient products working. The C3100 is now in that class.

The C3100 uses a language called OKI Hiper-C which is a little more than the compressed bitmap. At some point it was included in Linux distributions. Linux rarely drops a driver so oddly the C3100 may now be better supported by Linux than by the Windows systems it was originally intended for.

Processor:

200MHz

Memory:

32MB

Interface:

Hi-Speed USB

Print Languages:

Windows host based printing system

Power:

Single phase 220 & 240 VAC, frequency 50Hz +/-2Hz

Power Consumption:

Typical 330W, Peak 950W, Idle 110W (average), Power Save 16W

Dimensions:

342 x 400 x 528 mm

Weight:

20kg approx (without consumables)

Acoustic Noise:

Operating: 52dB(A)

Standby: 37dB(A)

Power Save: background level

Consumables:

42804516 - Black Toner Cartridge capable of printing up to 3000 A4 pages at 5% density

42804515 - Cyan Toner Cartridge capable of printing up to 3000 A4 pages at 5% density

42804514 - Magenta Toner Cartridge capable of printing up to 3000 A4 pages at 5% density

42804513 - Yellow Toner Cartridge capable of printing up to 3000 A4 pages at 5% density

Copyright G & J Huskinson & MindMachine Associates Ltd 2013, 2015. Some pictures derived from Oki User and Service guides. These technical pages do not constitute an offer for sale; just our knowledge at the time of writing. See the catalog. Sales pages on this Web site use cookies to store user information. We also use Google Analytics to track site usage patterns.