ALKHOBAR, 13 July 2004 — Anyone who has been reading my column for a while knows that I despise printers. My office runs as paperless as possible. When I do have a file to print, I send it to an office across town where they have an employee dedicated to fighting with the printer, fax and photocopier. He is a brave soul.

I had to resort to this tactic because a couple of years back I came to the conclusion that my printer actually had been loaded with malicious programming designed to destroy my sanity. That stupid machine ate documents, slurped cartridges and crumpled paper in 75 different ways. It demonstrated on numerous occasions that ink could be placed anywhere but on a page. Too often it took longer to print a document than to create it. The day I found myself late for a meeting and on my knees begging the printer to, “Please, please, spit out the page in one piece, just one time,” was the day I quit trying to print on my own.

I’m not alone in my hatred of printers. Ask at some of the largest enterprises in the land what the employees think about their office printers and the horror stories flood forth. Words such as unreliable, expensive, complex and aggravating are commonly used to describe machines that cost thousands. An enormous number of people would like to do their printers harm but they can’t. They actually need those machines too much to consider smashing them to smithereens. And so the desperate pleading between people and printers will go on.

Back in February, David Malloch, country manager, Saudi Arabia for Oki, approached me to take a look at Oki’s printers. I wasn’t enthusiastic, but Malloch was persistent. He buried me under enough documentation that it took two months for me to slog through it all. The numbers and technology seemed almost too good to be true.

Oki (www.middle-east.oki.com) is a company that is not well known in the Kingdom. This is more a factor of the difficulty they’ve had with their local distributors, than a reflection of their equipment quality. Oki is a major player in the printer market, selling printer solutions for business users in over 120 countries worldwide. Oki categorizes it products into four distinct segments: Serial Impact Dot Matrix (SIDM), Color Non-Impact Printers, Mono NIP and Fax/Multi Function peripherals. Oki’s printer, fax and associated products sales revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2004 was $637 million across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Oki employs over 1,200 people across EMEA in 60 wholly owned and representative offices.

While OKI launched its first printer, the Microline 80, in 1979, the company has actually been in existence since 1881. Starting with pioneering activities in the field of telecommunications, after World War II this Japanese company moved on to develop ATM machines, teletypewriters and electronic computers. Faxes and connectivity advances followed later in the century before printing came to the fore.

“Since September 2000 with the launch of the C7000 Series, OKI is at the forefront of innovation in the A4 and A3 color page printer market. Our market-leading, digital LED color printers bring high quality, fast color and fast mono printing at great prices and have enabled us to become No. 2 in Europe with 27 percent market share, according to IDC,” said Malloch. “With A4 color print speeds from 12-30ppm OKI has a printer to meet every user’s requirements and budget.”

We’ve been throwing around some technical jargon that requires a bit of explanation. Oki printers are built based on light-emitting diode (LED) technology for color and monochrome (black and white) printers, which provides higher printing speeds accompanied by higher resolutions when compared to traditional laser light sources. In addition, the digital LED light source in Oki printers eliminates any possibility for parallax or timing errors while printing.

Oki color printers have become well known for high-resolution printing combined with high speed. Taking a CD around town, we tried many different printers. No color enterprise printer could match Oki for quality. For example, we compared the Oki 5200, the HP 2500N and the Lexmark C912. All of these are enterprise printers with the Lexmark costing thousands of dollars more than either the HP or Oki. We printed the same color graphics on each machine using paper from the same ream. The HP’s print results were the worst. The color graphics were dull and lifeless with an extremely poor finish. Lexmark was better but the colors lacked vibrancy and some details readily visible when the graphics were displayed on screen, were lost in print.

In side by side comparisons with HP and Lexmark, the graphics printed on the Oki were amazing. On the pages printed by the Oki the finish was glossy and the pictures were bursting with life. All the fine details were clear and the minor shading differences were reproduced perfectly. This is certainly due in part to Oki’s auto color balance, which makes color printing as easy as mono printing. We passed the graphics around to over two dozen businessmen and every one of them agreed that the Oki print job was superior.

The Oki also allows companies to print many items in-house that would have previously been sent out to a professional printer. These include letterhead, business cards, banners, menus, catalogue selections, product brochures and corporate reports. Since outsourcing printing jobs in Saudi Arabia is not only time consuming, but also expensive and prone to error, an Oki printer’s ability to handle modern business color printing jobs on-site is a definite advantage. Oki offered us a printer, the Oki C3100, to test for a month.

“The OKI C3100 is unique, being the only single-pass printer in its class,” explained Malloch. “At 12ppm color and 16ppm mono no other printer delivers similar performance to the desktop, making it the only true 2-in-1 desktop printer. There’s no need to have separate color and mono printers or wait forever for an inkjet.”

In our trials we found the C3100 very easy to use and we had enormous fun torturing the printer. Taking suggestions from friends and colleagues we printed a huge variety of items including lesson plans for an Islamic art course, advertising handouts, brochures, sheet music, web pages, charts, graphs, Renaissance reproductions — even counterfeit currency. The results were excellent and we were sorry when the time came to give the printer back.

Since this column has been so enthusiastic about the quality and functionality of Oki, it might be assumed that price is where this manufacturer is defeated. But that’s not true. In fact, Oki generally costs less per printed page than other popular enterprise printers on the Saudi market. There is some confusion about how to actually calculate the real cost per printed page and initial purchase price of a machine is of limited importance when considering that cost. For laser printers it is necessary to factor in such variables as toner cost, toner coverage and consumables.

Producing an accurate cost per page comparison is quite time-consuming and well beyond the average small or medium sized business (SMB). To promote their printers, Oki has made available such cost comparisons and the results can be very enlightening. For example: compare the HP 1300n with the OKI B4300nPS. The OKI printer is slightly faster and costs quite a bit less. However, add in the cost of printing and the total cost of ownership becomes even more disparate.

HP 1300n’s purchase cost is about SR1,790. The printing cost of 5,000 pages per month at 5 percent coverage per page for 36 months is SR21,722. Total cost of the HP 1300n for three years is SR23,512. For an Oki B4300n the purchase price is SR1,342. The printing cost of 5,000 pages per month at 5 percent coverage per page for 36 months is SR12,229. Total cost of the Oki B4300n for three years is SR13, 571. If a color printer is used the difference is likely to be even greater.

Another factor in determining which printer is a better value is DPI (dots per inch). DPI is almost universally accepted in the Middle East as the best guide to the output quality of a printer, but it can be misleading. Most people think that the dot size of a 1200x1200 dpi resolution printer is one inch (254mm) divided by 1200 = 21.2 microns. In actual fact, most “laser” printers are incapable of producing a dot size smaller than 60 microns. Competing technologies such as LED can actually produce a dot size of 34 microns. DPI is fairly meaningless unless you also ask what size the dots are. Even where dot size is identical other considerations are also important:

• What is the shape of the dot?

• Where is the dot placed within its allocated space?

• Which dots are selected for printing? One 60-micron dot takes the space of nearly nine 1200x1200 dot locations.

• What is the toner composition?

When the printer is one that can print in color, the picture becomes even more complex and the usefulness of DPI as a measure of print quality diminishes even further. The size of the color gamut (the number of colors that can be printed) can make a significant difference to the output quality. Print quality is best assessed using comparative print samples.

The truth is that there is no single, easy method by which SMBs can ensure that they buy the printer best suited to their requirements. Large organizations depend on their IT staff and purchasing departments to fully investigate the differences between products. Individual purchasers have no such resources available to them and must rely on the dealer channel to provide this information. Oki is committed to making the needed information available to SMBs.

“Until now, awareness of the excellent performance and value which OKI printers provide has been limited by the lack of an adequate distribution channel in Saudi Arabia,” said Malloch. “I’m now working closely with our distributors to make OKI printers widely available from dealers and retailers. I hope that soon Oki will be a name all Saudi businessmen will associate with affordable, quality printing.”

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