OKI colour printers save costs of printing banners elsewhere

Producing vivid colour banners is now effortless with the OKI C7000 A4 and new C9000 A3+ printers from Printacom, a member of the JSE-listed MB Technologies Group. The C7000 and C9000 printers are a series of high-speed single-pass digital LED colour printers that require no additional equipment for printing banners other than suitable paper.

"These are ideal printers for a host of sales and marketing applications. The banner capabilities are also great for producing conference and presentation materials, ultra-wide spreadsheets, graphs and flow charts - all in full colour," says Neil Rom, managing director of Printacom. "These are possible because OKI colour printers use Single-Pass Technology, an innovative, compact digital LED system with four in-line digital LED heads and image drums that print each page in a single pass."

Conventional colour laser printers use multi-pass technology and therefore need to take each page around the imaging drum four times to achieve full CMYK colour - not compatible with banners. The C7000 Series produces banners of up to 210mm wide, and the C9000 Series of up to 320mm wide. Both printers print to a maximum length of 900mm and on paper up to 200gsm in weight.

The C7000 Series handles a comprehensive range of media, from standard paper sizes up to A4 and the C9000 Series up to A3+ with weights ranging from 75 - 200gsm, to envelopes, labels and transparencies. Rom adds: "All OKI printer models are equipped with a 530/550-sheet paper tray (a 100-sheet auto paper feeder), 500-sheet face down paper stacker and 100-sheet face-up paper stacker as standard."

The C9000 Series is supplied with a job-offset feature for easy separation of documents. Paper input options are available to bring the total input capacity on the C7000 Series up to 1 690 sheets or 2 850 sheets on the C9000 Series.

Built-in automatic colour registration enables these printers to deliver outstanding print quality up to true 1200 x 1200 dpi.

Standard memory on the C7000 Series ranges from 64Mb to 256Mb or on the C9000 Series 128Mb to 320Mb and is model dependant. Memory can be upgraded to a maximum of 1024Mb, ensuring workgroups have access to all of the functionality they need. Vibrant colour output is produced at 1200 x 600dpi (1200 x 1200dpi on the C7400/C9400) and the range of options available includes duplex units and integral hard-drives for all models to further increase functionality.

Another add-on to all printer models, says Rom is form overlays. "Files, such as letterheads, logos and invoices, can be downloaded using OKI`s storage device manager, via the network, to the printer and stored for `printing on demand` as required - reducing cost, providing more flexibility and dramatically increasing productivity."

Similarly, when printing multi-copying jobs from the network, the data spool for the first set of copies is temporarily stored inside the printer, with the rest of the sets of copy printed from the stored data spool, thus reducing network traffic and allowing faster printing.

Considerable attention has also been given to the consumables. The specially formulated toner has eliminated the need for separate fusing oil resulting in less user intervention, mess and waste. This simpler `oil-less` toner results in a smooth finish and excellent print quality, particularly with media such as transparencies.

The high capacity toner cartridges achieve 10 000 or 15 000 x A4 pages (C7000 and C9000 Series respectively) at 5% density resulting in less down time and fewer user interventions. The EP drums can achieve 30 000 to 39 000 pages on continuous print and the fuser units and belt kits a staggering 60 000 to 120 000 pages. Also by producing virtually no o-zone during operation the OKI C Series qualifies to carry the Energy Star EPA pollution logo and all major plastic parts are marked for recycling.