Issue #0519/1 - Continuing its drive to challenge Hewlett-Packard for the number one market slot, Oki is attempting to woo users with its message of ease of colour production and low costs.
As Oki expresses its excitement at taking the number two position in IDC’s research of the Western European market for colour printers, the company has launched an aggressive new attack on the market with an advertising and promotional campaign and new versions of its colour printers designed to encourage users to make that switch towards colour printing.
Oki C3200nWith TV advertising (in the UK in particular) to support its products and the new global ‘Oki Printing Solutions’ branding, Oki is focussing on the ability of its printers to assist business users with easy in-house production of materials typically outsourced. Differentiation is the key to success, Oki believes. This includes both differentiation of its products through the inclusion of its software suite and differentiation achievable by business users in terms of the materials they are capable of producing using the Oki software and printer.
As mentioned in TCPglobal Issue #0515 - "Oki reinvents itself to build on success", Oki has refreshed the C3000 and C5000 product lines. Specifically targeting those small companies that wish to produce marketing materials in-house, enhanced features of all the new models include a ‘Photo Enhance’ mode that allows photo-like images to be printed on ordinary plain office paper.
At the bottom end of the range, the C3200, starting at just £279, is explicitly aimed at drawing cost-conscious users out of the mono age and into the colour age. Its 20ppm mono and 12ppm colour print speeds are suited to the small company environment where a personal hands-on approach to the production of marketing materials is required.
New to the C3000 family is a network-ready model, C3200n, which also adds an LCD status screen and optional duplex unit for increased usability and versatility. It also makes the device suited to small workgroup environments where responsibility for production is shared.
Moving up the range; both the new C5250 (starting at £489) and C5450 (starting at £679) offer 16ppm colour printing and 24ppm in mono and offer networking and duplex printing as an option (or standard on n or dn models), with hard drive options also available on certain models.
Customers must, however, still specify the n or dn models if they require network or duplex printing functionality. Oki still needs to catch up with the trend in the current market place and offer networking as a standard out-of-the-box capability.
With all of these new models, as with their predecessors, Oki stresses that the separate drum and toner configuration increases cost efficiency of the hardware by reducing operating costs over a period of time.
As usual, the statement does not take into account the fact that more Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs) means more interruptions in the printing process in order to maintain the device on a day-to-day basis – "Day-to-day maintenance - is it more cost-effective on time to have single-piece or multi-piece colour consumables?". While longer life units are usually beneficial to the customer, this becomes a problem when the projected life expectancy of the units are not coordinated – as is the case with the Oki colour printers.
Oki’s core message with these new colour printers is the inclusion of a suite of software utilities that are specifically designed to make the printing experience quicker, easier, more productive and more enjoyable for the user.
Although Oki claims a total of seven utilities being supplied with the printers, this includes the Storage Device Manager that is only available with the C5450 models. Storage Device Manager reduces the time required for users to download fonts and forms to the printer.
Ask OkiIn addition, two of the utilities would normally be considered to be part of the feature set rather than as a utility. These are the Auto Colour Correction and Auto Media Detect functions.
So, this leaves four core components of the software utility suite, as follows:
- Template Manager that assists users in the creation of a wide range of forms, labels and business documents
- Print Supervision that permits the user to interrogate networked printers to help with monitoring the devices and to obtain data to assist in reporting and management
- Print Control Software that provides a job accounting function for tracking of printer usage and cost
- Provision of an ‘Ask Oki’ button on the driver dialog box to provide rapid access to the ‘Ask Oki’ web site, where the user can find advice and assistance
| UK (5,000/month) | Purchase | Nominal CPP |
Mixed mono/colour CPP over 3 years |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oki C3200n | £399 |
Mono Colour |
1.65 pence 9.41 pence |
3.48 pence |
| Oki C5250n | £519 |
Mono Colour |
1.36 pence 7.52 pence |
3.43 pence |
| Oki C5450n | £678 |
Mono Colour |
1.36 pence 7.52 pence |
3.54 pence |
Note that for this level of machine, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 5,000 pages per month using maximum capacity toners and takes into account any standard, or starter, toner cartridges shipped with the printer and includes the purchase price.
Oki believes that it can close the gap between its improving market position and the overall leadership enjoyed by Hewlett-Packard even further as time progresses and its new products, including the desktop colour MFPs, the C5510MFP and C5540MFP, establish themselves in the market.
“This market growth has been achieved through OKI Printing Solutions’ ability to provide businesses of all sizes with unprecedented value add printing solutions that include ‘in the box’ document design and management software and high performance colour printing without having to compromise on speed, quality or cost.”
“We are an agent for change. Looking forward our aim is to get organisations to modify the way they think about printing, with previously impossible aspects now being achievable using modern technology, software and media. This has led to such an explosion of potential applications and management processes and is very different to how our main competitor does business.”
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