The Oki B430dn is a budget digital monochrome laser printer that boasts above-budget features and delivers above-budget performance. It has earned a great deal of critical praise, and many respected reviewers, such as Windows Magazine, listed it as an Editor's Choice the year it premiered. The Oki B430dn provides all that you need as a home user, and it is feature-rich and durable enough to serve the small office with light-duty printing needs. The B430dn has a 5.5-second warm-up time, and it prints a resolution of 1,200 x 1,200dpi at an impressive rate of 30 pages per minute. It has a 297MHz processor, 64MB memory upgradable to 320MB, and 300 sheet capacity upgradeable to 850 sheets.
Design
Oki uses a black box design for the entire B400 series. That means that it may stand out in an office environment where most of the computer peripherals are business white, but it blends in perfectly in the average home or home office environment. This black box design is extremely compact and squat. It takes up just as much space as it needs, and you won't have a problem positioning it in cramped quarters. It is a little heavier than you might expect, and is probably too cumbersome to be a portable option. The Oki B430dn toner printer has a minimalist on-board interface, but the LCD display does excellent job of status indication. It has an Ethernet port, USB 2.0 ports, and parallel interfaces.
Advantages
The biggest advantage to the Oki B430dn is the performance it provides. You simply won't find many laser printers at this price range that deliver this kind of text printing quality at 30 pages per minute. The B400 series also used a sophisticated processor and has ample memory. What this means is that it will handle large, complex, and diverse print jobs fluidly. You can even upgrade memory to handle professional jobs. High-yield Oki B430dn toner cartridges are available at cheap prices on Cartridge Save.
Disadvantages
The Oki B430dn is a little noisy, which could pose a problem in small work areas or living areas. It's not terribly loud, but you certainly won't want to use it while watching television. Another issue is the software and drivers. The software is underwhelming, and while the machine works wonderfully once configured, it doesn't always want to play nice during setup. This difficult configuration can be even worse in Mac OS X and Linux environments.
