With the rapid growth of enterprise networks, more and more devices are
being introduced to bring information to the desktops. As a result, many
reports are now routed to network-attached printers located near the end
user instead of the large system-attached printers located in data centers.
many
new department-size printers, equipped with higher print speeds and added
features, are available to handle the workload. This review focuses on the
OKIPAGE® 24 printer and its performance with the VPS® suite of Enterprise
Output Management products distributed by Levi, Ray & Shoup, Inc. (LRS).
Testing was performed by Systems Engineers in the LRS® Enterprise Document
Engineering (EDE) Department.
Company Profile
Headquartered in Mt Laurel NJ, Oki Data Americas, Inc. is a subsidiary
of Oki Data Corporation of Japan. The company was founded in 1972 as a joint
venture between two Philadelphia entrepreneurs and their Japanese customer,
Oki Electric, to develop and produce leading edge information technology
products. Oki Data has become the number one impact printer manufacturer in
North America with a 37 percent market share, according to Dataquest.
As the leading manufacturer of dot matrix printers, Oki Data supplies
products for use in point-of-sale, industrial, and data processing
applications. The company also enjoys success with its line of digital LED
page printers, multifunction products, and plain paper facsimile machines.
The Oki Data product line includes 9 and 24-pin impact printers, digital LED
color and monochrome page printers from 8ppm to 24ppm, plain paper fax
machines, and multifunction products. Oki Data is on the web at www.okidata.com.
Product Highlights
The modular design of the OKIPAGE 24 Series allows you to configure the
printer for your current needs while providing room for growth. You can also
get network efficiency out of the box (or as an upgrade later), the
outstanding reliability of OKI's digital LED printhead technology, and these
performance features:
- 24 pages per minute; 6.7 seconds to first page
- 600 dpi output; 600x1200 dpi graphics
- 630-sheet letter/legal standard paper capacity for OKIPAGE 24 and
OKIPAGE 24n; 1,160-sheet standard for OKIPAGE 24Tn (all expandable to
1,790 sheets)
- Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) support with OkiLAN (6100e+ print
server)
- Wireless printing with OkiLAN 6100e+ print server and optional IrDA
transceiver
- Duplex (2-sided printing) optional
Our test model was equipped with the OkiLAN 6111e+ internal network card,
internal duplexing, 630-sheet letter/legal paper bin, and 32MB installed memory.
Configuration
and Testing
The installation of the printer was simple and required minimal time. The
internal OkiLAN 6100e+ card comes with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP)
enabled by default which loaded all of the TCP/IP parameters and set a
dynamic IP address obtained from the DHCP server on the LRS network. Using a
standard web browser, we configured a static IP address (typically required
by VPS/TCPIP) and disabled DHCP through the configuration menus. We also set
the protocols for our test using a standard web browser. HP®
JetAdmin®
protocol was enabled while Netware®, Banyan VINES®, LAN
Manager®, and EtherTalk® protocols were disabled.
The VPS environment we used for
testing was VPS V1 R8.0 at maintenance level 35, which we configured to
include VPS/TCPIP and VPS/PCL. The OKIPAGE 24DX was configured to support
TCP/IP using both the LPR/LPD protocol and the direct sockets connection.
The
printer was first configured in VPS as a standard LPD supported device using
the VPS keywords COMMTYPE=(TCPIP,LPD) and TCPRPORT=515. Our VPS printer
definition contained two special TCP/IP printer options. We used keyword
TCPDISC=(,,0010) to wait 10 seconds after the connection is closed before
trying to reconnect and keyword TCPOPTS=00100000 to process multiple copies
by sending the dataset multiple times.
An additional keyword, TCPPRTR can
be used to specify the name of the printer at the remote print host. The
OkiLAN 6100e uses the Remote Print Queue Name to determine which printer
port will service the print job and how to convert an ASCII print job based
on special characters in the name used as ASCII conversion specifiers (FF,
LF, NF). We do not recommend using the ASCII conversion specifiers with VPS.
The
OKIPAGE 24DX was also configured in VPS as a direct sockets supported device
using the VPS Keyword COMMTYPE=(TCPIP,SOK). The remote port number used to
receive the data on the OKILAN 6100e adapter is 9100 and is defined in the
VPS printer definition using the keyword TCPRPORT=9100. The VPS printer
definition also contained the keyword RELREQ=I, since the direct sockets
connection can maintain the connection until all the available output is
delivered. In general, we recommend the use of the direct sockets connection
for functionality and performance.
We tested the printer in three steps.
Step one consisted of standard line-mode reports along with lone-mode
reports formatted with VPS user exit 14 to add PCL and PostScript®
formatting commands. All output and formats printed correctly.
In step
two, we modified the VPS printer definition to include support for VPS/PCL.
The printer definition was changed to include the keyword CONVTYPE=PCL. This
option allows output referencing AFP resources to be converted to PCL Prior
to being sent to the printer. Reports formatted by VPS/PCL containing
multiple fonts, overlays, and page segments printed correctly.
The third
step was to deliver host output through AnyQueue™ to the OKIPAGE
24. All output and formats printed correctly.
Features & Options: OKIPAGE 24DX
| Parameter | Description |
| Print Speed | 24 ppm |
| 6.7 seconds to first page |
Print Resolution
| 600 dpi output
600 x 1200 dpi graphics |
| Standard RAM Memory | OKIPAGE
24DX: 16 MB |
| OKIPAGE 24DXn: 32 MB |
| Maximum RAM Memory | 80 MB |
| CPU | MIPS®
R4700, 120MHz, 32 bit |
| Compatibility | Windows®
98 |
| Windows®
95 |
| Windows®
3.1x |
| Windows NT®
4.0 |
| MS-DOS®
|
| Most other operating systems |
Emulations
| PCL®
6 |
| Epson®
FX (9-pin) |
| Adobe PostScript Level 2 |
| IBM®
ProPrinter®
III XL |
| Duty Cycle | Up to 65,000 pages per month
maximum |
| Interfaces | IEEE
1284 compliant bi-directional parallel port |
| Internal Serial Interface RS232-C |
| Networking | 10/100BASE-T
Ethernet internal print server optional |
| Paper Handling Fonts | 530-sheet
legal/universal tray |
| 100-sheet manual feed |
| 1790- maximum paper input |
Fonts
|
| 35 PCL scalable fonts |
| 10 True-Type®
scalable fonts |
| 30 PostScript fonts |
| Line Printer font |
| Postnet, OCRA and OCRB |
Report Card
OKIPAGE 24DX
| Installation |  + | | | Ratings: | | | = no problems | | - | = problems | | + | = above average | | N/A | = not applicable |
|
| VPS | |
| VPS/PCL | |
| VPS/IPDS | N/A |
| VPS/TCPIP | |
| AnyQueue | |
