Original Toners










Spares















OKI C5600 Colour Laser Printer

The OKI C5600 was introduced in 2006. It is part of a wider C5000 series that starts with the C5100 and ended with the C5950

Within that C5000 series these C5600 printers were towards the "low end" penultimate versions - the C5650 series came after that and then OKI switched design to get the rather different C301/C531 engine.

What makes the C5600 low-end is that they take smaller colour cartridges and use OKI's proprietary Hiper-C host based print language. However the "print driver compatibility with Windows 10" list says the Windows7/Vista driver is still supported - with a couple of reservations.

The C5900 took bigger cartridges and had the PCL and PostScript languages so it will work even if OKI and Microsoft don't provide a driver for future versions of Windows. However all of these printers are a bit long in the tooth - but you can still get spares.

The level truth about printers is that they aren't very exciting and if you have an OKI C5600 and like it then what you have is a reasonably solid machine.   We'd like to get all excited about the features of new printers, gigabit networking, Near Field printing from SmartPhones but to be honest it probably isn't a priority in most offices. To make up a brochure or a report you still have to download pictures to your PC.   A nice solid printer is worth more than a dozen features.

Oki said of it …

Fast, quality A4 mono printer with controlled colour capability

As well as delivering the fastest mono print in its class, the OKI C5600 also gives class-leading colour. So with one easy-to-use solution, you can fulfil your need for high volume, low cost, mono printing while giving a real business edge to those documents that need it. And you can do it all without losing control of costs. The cost of printing in mono is comparable to mono-only printers, and we provide in-box software, Print Control, to enable you to monitor and manage colour usage costs

Main Features of the C5600 Colour Laser Printer

  • Class-leading print speeds of 32 pages per minute (ppm) mono and 20 ppm colour.
  • Fast time to first print at just 8 seconds for a mono page or 11 seconds for colour.
  • Input capacity of up to 330 sheets, with an optional second paper tray.
  • Paper weights up to 203gsm
  • Straight paper path for fewer paper jams
  • Pro Q2400 Multi-level technology
  • Low cost colour toner cartridges.
  • High capacity mono toner cartridges reduce running costs.
  • Auto colour balance
  • Banner and sign printing up 1.2m
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LED Printheads

OKI are very proud of their LED printheads which are used on almost all their electrophotographic printers.

These printers are "electrophotographic" but not laser-printers - because they don't have a laser and a scanner. Instead they have four bars of microscopic LEDs behind lenses. LED printheads have no moving parts and the semiconductor core will not heat up like a laser does. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are solid-state semiconductors and there was a hope at one time that arrays of them on a chip could be used for screens but the manufacturing difficulty of that has never been cracked. OKI's laser heads come as close as we get.

The basic mechanism of a laser printer (and a photocopier) is that

  • static electricity has a stong enough pull to move small particles of coloured "toner powder".
  • the amount of static on a photoconductor can be controlled using light

In almost all recent machines the photoconductor is a cylinder of aluminium called a drum. The drum is coated in a greenish plastic called photoconductor - which is actually two or three micron-thick layers that act as an insulator in the dark but a conductor in light. The drum is given an electric charge - typically about -600 volts - in the dark. In this case it is then exposed to a patten of light from the LEDs.

A part of the OKI drum unit called the developer presents toner powder to the drum. The toner is also charged to about -600 volts and since like charges repel it can't stick. Where the drum has been discharged by light toner does stick creating the print pattern.

This is a colour printer so it uses four coloured toners. The colours used are Cyan, Magenta and Yellow because mixtures of these "secondary" colours can give just about every shade in the rainbow - and more brightly than the Red, Green and Blue used by screens. A little fly in the ointment is that if Cyan, Magenta and Yellow are overprinted the result looks brown - so there is also a black toner to give a nice strong black for ordinary print - it also cuts the printing cost because otherwise the most common colour would be made by mixing three others.

Most office printing is done by light controlling static electricity. Old analogue copiers do that using a bright green flourescent tube. Laser printers do it using a laser beam scanned by mirrors.

OKI decided to use LED bars to control the illumination back in the early 1990s and have done so ever since. There are 600 LEDs per inch across the page - about 5,000 in all. In the C5600 group of printers they are capable of 4 level of illumination so that gives better print than might be expected from a 600dpi laser.

There is a bit more on the C5100 page.

Duty Cycle:

Printer Duty (max): 60,000 pages/month

Printer Duty (average): 1,500 - 5,000 pages/month

Nothing dreadful happens if you exceed the average print duty - except to your bank balance paying for all those cartridges. You'll need transfer belts and fusers regularly as well.

OKI's service manual for these printers says the intended service life is 420,000 pages or 5 years. Again (so far as we know) nothing horrible happens as you go beyond that page count.

Upto 32ppm Black

Upto 20ppm Colour

ProQ2400 Multi-level technology 1200 x 600 dpi

Printheads actually give 600 dpi in the horizontal (8.5 inch) direction of paper travel. 1200 dpi can be achieved using more scan lines. The ProQ2400 claim is based on the fact that the LEDs are capable of 4 levels so dot size doesn't shrink (they are invisible anyway) but the possible gradation of colours increases.

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Print Drivers, Processor Power and Memory

A potential problem with the C5600 is that it's Hiper-C print language is unusual, non-standard and only just supported into Windows 10 using the Windows 7/Vista driver modified for 64 bit.

Print languages are actually a bit clumsy. At one time (under DOS and Unix) the application programs needed to know about the graphics adapter and the print language. An application driver would translate information from its own internal representation of information to the print language. This was simple enough for text but possibly not for vectors - and a full-screen photographic bitmap couldn't be turned into anything else so it would be going to the printer more or less as-is but perhaps stripped of colour and depth information. A printer would be churning along happily producing text than come to a halt for quarter of an hour on a picture.

The obvious question with Hi-Speed USB and Gigabit Ethernet is why not use the computer to make up page images and transfer those directly across the high speed link. That is pretty much what Hiper-C does. The benefit of this is that the printer doeesn't need so much processor power and RAM for page formatting because it leaves that up to the computer's print drivers. … So far, so sensible.

Problems come after some years as the operating system changes. API's don't last forever and the recent big change is the shift from 32 bit to 64 bit operating systems. Neither OKI nor Microsoft want the trouble and expense of updating old drivers. After all, OKI did say the life of these printers was intended to be 5 years.

Printers that support languages such as PCL and PostScript don't strictly need their own print driver. The printer should work with any PostScript driver that supports (roughly) the right feature set. It should work with the generic Windows PCL and PostScript drivers which are oddly positioned under HP and called:

  • HP LaserJet Family driver PCL5
  • HP LaserJet Family driver PS

Other changes are that Windows still dominates in desktop and notebook computers but Android does in smartphones and tablets - so perhaps a Windows only printer doesn't look quite so clever? Although Hiper-C was intended to transfer pages from Windows there is in fact a "foo2hiperc" driver so that Linux distributions can use them. CUPS print utilities are developed by Apple so presumably these printers work with Mac. Android is Linux based so in principle it can use the drivers as well. The C5000 series Hiper-C printers may wind up working with everything except Windows.

Paper Handling:

Internal tray capacity (tray 1) & paper weight: 300 sheets of 80gsm. Paper sizes: A4, A5, B5, A6

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

Banner Print is a point to note if you were thinking of replacing a printer with something other than OKI. Its an unusual feature.

Memory:

64MB

Windows Host Based Printing System

Power:

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

Power Consumption:

Typical 490W, Peak 1200W, Idle 100W (average), Power Save & 15W

Dimensions:

339.5 x 435 x 563.5 mm

Weight:

approx 26kgs (includes all consumables)

Toner and drum positions
Oki toner and drum cross-section

Acoustic Noise:

Operating: Up to 55.6 dB(A)

Standby: 37 dB(A)

Power Save: Background Level

Consumables:

One of the ways OKI printers differ from HP and Canon is in using separate toners and drums. OKI do this even for fairly low capacity printers, as in this case. The 6,000 page cartridge is moderately large by industry standards but the 2,000 page colour cartridges are really quite small. Whether you like having two components is probably a matter of being used to it; it does potentially reduce the waste of resources on cartridges. It doesn't have to make fault diagnosis more difficult because there are almost no workings in the toner cartridge so any fault you have will almost always relate to the drum.

ColourPages: Compatible with OKI codeGTIN
Black6,000 C5600 etc4332440805031713031260 £93.35 +vat
Cyan2,000 C5600 etc4338190705031713031413 £85.54 +vat
Magenta 2,000 C5600 etc4338190605031713031406 £85.54 +vat
Yellow2,000 C5600 etc4338190505031713031390 £85.54 +vat
ColourPages: Compatible with OKI codeGTIN
Black20,000 C5600 etc4338170805031713031482 £61.11 +vat
Cyan20,000 C5600 etc4338170705031713031475 £61.11 +vat
Magenta20,000 C5600 etc4338170605031713031468 £61.11 +vat
Yellow20,000 C5600 etc4338170505031713031451 £61.11 +vat

Cartridges for the OKI C5600 also fit the C5700

Fuser and Belt

PartPages: Compatible with OKI codeGTIN
Fuser60,000 C5600 etc4336320305031713031536 £197.65 +vat
Belt60,000 C5600 etc4336341205031713031543 £107.15 +vat

Fuser 43363203 fits the C5600 generation printers: The C5600, C5700, C5800, C5900 - and all their n, dn, and dtn variations including the curious Ldn. The fuser aslo fits the C5550MFP and the MC560.

Changing the fuser is easy - it has two blue release levers and lifts out.

Transfer kit or "Belt" 43363412 (also known as 43363402) fits a range of OKI's older A4 printers: C710 C5550, C5600, C5650, C5700, C5750, C5800, C5850, C5900 -and all their n, dn, and dtn variations. It also fits the MC560.

Changing the transfer belt is not quite so easy as the fuser - all the toner-drum unit need to be lifted out in one piece and put somewhere clean, and dust free that won't be damaged by a bit of lose toner - a sheet of newspaper for instance. The drums shouldn't be out of the machine for more than 5 minutes as they are damaged by exposure to light. The transfer belt lifts out by it's big blue handle at the front.

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Consumer goods brands like product churn - they prefer to sell new stuff rather than look after the old.

As a printer ages people become more and more inclined to try refilled, re-manufactured and compatible toners. OKI is vulnerable to this because its toner cartridges are little more than a big plastic box verified by an RFID circuit.

Furthermore after a couple of years the re-manufacturing industry gets quite good at it's game and starts to produce cartridges with respectable quality. At this point the printer manufacturer would really like you to buy a new product - with a new and different killer chip to prevent refills.

OKI have been quite good with these printers: they are nicely made, spares are available and the toners and drums are not outrageously priced for the size. We mention elsewhere that the Windows 7/Vista drivers should still work.

Whilst it is true that you can get refilled toner much more cheaply that may not be all joy. The colour isn't usually so good - although that often doesn't matter for sales flyers and catalogues.

We would advise against switching from an OKI toner to a "clone" on the same drum. Toner formulations vary in their properties and whilst different toners may work singly they can give very odd behaviour if they are mixed.

Warranty:

Oki originally gave a Pan European 1 year on-site warranty. All of these printers will be beyond any extended warranty period.

Service:

One of the nice things about these machines is that all the main parts are user changeable - including fuser, transfer belt and the paper pickup rollers. Because of this engineering callout should only rarely be needed.

That is rather unusual in printers with fairly small toners, which often have belts and fusers wired in and need quite a lot of screwdriver work to change such parts. Small printers from HP and Canon, Samsung and Brother do much the same. It is difficult not to conclude that such smaller and lesser printers are made to be "disposable".

These OKI printers are nicely built - perhaps because OKI were also using the engine in machines which take 5,000 page toners. Yes, some of the parts are quite expensive and it is true that the belt and fuser could fail at roughly the same time - and that you could buy a whole colour printer for £130. However you don't get a very nice colour printer for anything like £130; you get a thing with wired in belt and fuser and squitty little 1,000 page cartridges - or an inkjet (yuk).

hopping roller position
hopping roller replacement

Paper Misfeeds and Jams

Paper misfeeds are probably the most likely problem that won't be solved by changing drums, belt and fuser.

The usual position for a misfeed is just as the paper leaves the cassette. At this point the "pickup and feed" rollers are made of soft rubber. Most of the other rollers in the printer are made of nylon, metal or hard rubber and nowhere near as likely to wear out.

OKI give thre rollers strange names: what other manufacturers would call the pickup is a "sub roller" and the feed is a "hopping roller". They work quite conventionally though, the sub roller starts paper moving and the hopping roller drives it up and out of the tray into the feed rollers in the front of the printer.

The usual scenario is that paper does move, but not far enough because worn rollers don't have sufficient traction. Usually its the big roller that is the problem; paper sticks just on the separation pad or in the printer throat. .

The rollers are actually easy to change; they clip in place. Take the cassette out and look up into the front of the printer. There are two rollers a big grey one in front and a smaller one behind.

The separation pad clips into the front of the cassette. It's job is to prevent two sheets of paper feeding at the same time, so if that seems to be a problem it may need changing. An indented surface on the pad can also cause too much friction so that the pickup roller can't overcome the load.

The OKI manuals seem to suggest that only the big roller needs replacing - and that might be true if you are happy to allow the printer to die at 420,000 pages.

The main problem changing OKI rollers is that OKI give them peculiar names and the service manuals make finding which belongs in a printer clear as mud.

Paper jams at the rear of the printer are likely to be exit rollers but could be ridges in the exit plastic - diagnosing that sort of thing is a job for an experienced technician or service engineer. The printer error-codes should help distinguish between causes.