OKI C5300 Colour Laser Printer

Later versions of this print engine achieved 26ppm in colour and 32ppm in monochrome. This is often the way with print engines, they are introduced at a low speed but later made to go faster. At the time an engine is introduced most of the competition at the price point are all offering similar speeds; then one brand gets a clear lead and the rest catch up until a fundamental change forces a complete redesign and a new engine.

For most people, most of the time, once a machine is producing 20 pages per minute it is fine. There are a few jobs like catalogue production where speed is of the essence.

We aren't sure what limits the C5300 print speed, and why the colour speed is oddly below the black speed considering both work onto the same transfer belt. Perhaps it is that colour registration drifts more at higher speed. Maybe the processor needs longer to do a 4-colour separation?

Much the same story applies to print resolution. Today's standard for electrophotography tends to be 1200x1200 and sometimes odd figures like 2400x600. There is a steady drift upwards in the figures not always accompanied by any startling improvement in the look of documents.

These printers are being retired because they were sold in the age of Windows XP.   Microsoft has stopped supporting XP and the printer brands in turn don't support the drivers - and have taken the opportunity to take them off their sites. XP drivers will only work under Windows 32 bit - there won't be any 64 bit signed drivers for old printers.

There are a C5300PCL and C5300PS drivers for Windows Vista. That may not help much because Windows Vista proved shortlived.

The printers still work using the drivers in Linux. The Linux tradition is not to take anything away - there are still drivers for the Okijet 2500 of 1997. In the open source community drivers don't belong to anyone, so brands can't confiscate them once they are out in the wild.   we use Linux, we don't offer Windows support.

Windows users need better help than "change operating system"; (Linux has issues too, it takes time to get familiar with it).

It isn't strictly necessary to use a driver specifically for a printer. Computer and printer do need to share a print language otherwise the printer will print nothing, text only - or most likely that old favourite trick, page after page with a bit of graphical gibberish at the top.

Rather obviously, the OKI printer isn't a LaserJet - but language should be more important than brand. If OKI implemented something in a proprietary way it may not work - but they probably tried to avoid that.   The HP Color LaserJet was the first HP colour model and had PCL 5c. It is usually best to opt for the oldest printer that has the features you need as it's behaviour usually became standard. However the Color LaserJet didn't have two trays or duplex - and some C5300 printers do.

One possible answer is to use the Add Printer Wizard to install a C5950. It is not usually a good idea to install the driver for a more recent printer because it will have more features. In this case the basic feature set is correct but the manual for the C5950 does mention 4 level output and that for the C5300 does not so the colours might not be right.

The most likely answer is to use the Add Printer Wizard to get a generic PCL or PostScript driver. Oddly Windows doesn't place this under "Generic Drivers" which just offer a couple of dot-matrix. Instead it is under HP. There are "HP LaserJet Family driver PCL5" for PCL and "HP LaserJet Family driver PS" for PostScript (after the numbered printers and just before the LaserJet III).

Suggestions seem to be that the PCL5 driver is PCL 5e which didn't support colour.

PostScript may be the better option. The Microsoft generic driver is presumably PostScript 3 which has colour handling - and has for a long time. PostScript was intended to be entirely standard and it is stable. In principle PostScript supports duplexers and trays and the Microsoft LaserJet Family Driver offers the options. Whether it will work we can't say; some printers expect that information to come from a job-ticket rather than in-band with the print language.   A complex PostScript page can be a lot more memory hungry than PCL - but a working printer is better than a dead one!.

There is not a great deal of information online about Microsoft's generic print drivers - just a couple of hundred mentions in Google. That may sound a lot but it isn't; if a subject is well known there are tens of thousands. We don't know whether there is some fundamental problem to stop them working with C5000 family printers that have PostScript and PCL but there shouldn't be.

We don't have a printer to test, there are thousands of printers and we don't have these. (If you want things testing you could send let us know the results of your own test, or if you have a few printers that are going for scrap, send us one).