Oki’s Color Laser MFP Is Fast, but Output and Design Fall Short

PCWorld Latest Technology: Oki’s Color Laser MFP Is Fast, but Output and Design Fall Short

The Oki MC360 color laser multifunction printer arrives in the low-cost end of the category ($549 as of 1/8/2010), offering better-than-average speed, especially compared with the lower-priced Brother MFC-9320CW. It also has some nice features. Unfortunately, Oki’s careless documentation and overstyled design make the machine harder to use than it should be.

The MC360 performed quickly–but not well–in our tests. Plain text exited at an above-average rate of 12.6 pages per minute (ppm), graphics at 4.5 ppm. It printed grayscale and line-art samples surprisingly quickly compared with the competition, from 3.5 ppm to 4.9 ppm, respectively. Unfortunately, color and grayscale images tended to be oversaturated and sometimes grainy. Scan quality was disappointing: both printed and onscreen scans looked murky; line art was rough.