The Oki Data C5500n may not wow you with its print quality, particularly on photos and other images, but it's a good workhorse for a home office or small business. This color laser printer is also a smart choice if speed is more important than top-notch output quality.

The inclusion of an OkiLAN 10/100 Base-T Internal Ethernet Print Server makes the C5500n network-ready out of the box. It also has a USB 2.0 connection, so you don't necessarily need to connect it to a network.

The C5500n uses four different-color toner cartridges that are easy to replace. Two types of cartridges are available, with outputs of up to 5,000 pages or up to 2,000 pages. Per-page printing costs are about 12 cents for color and 2.3 cents for monochrome with the high-capacity cartridges, and about 13 cents for color and 2.4 cents for monochrome with the low-capacity cartridges.

The paper cassette is limited to 300 sheets, letter or legal, and an auxiliary input tray can hold up to an additional 100 sheets of paper. In addition, a straight passthrough lets you print single sheets of heavier stock. An optional 530-sheet paper cassette is available ($183.99), for a total potential capacity of 930 sheets. There are no built-in duplexing capabilities, but an optional duplexing unit ($143.99) is available.

No printer ever quite lives up to its manufacturer's speed claims, but we found the C5500n to be satisfyingly fast. The C5500n ships with 64MB RAM, which is upgradeable to 320MB for easier handling of large or graphics-heavy print jobs.

Overall output quality is good for home office and other small business use. With a maximum resolution of 1,200X600, text is generally crisp and readable, even at most smaller font sizes. Line art is sharp, with few broken lines except among very fine details. The C5500n's color photo prints tend to have a slight color cast, and large areas of solid colors or grays, such as in bar charts, tend to show banding.

Output from the Oki Data C5500n won't meet the standards of graphics professionals, but it is a good color laser printer for home office and small business use.

Pros: Fast output, reasonably good quality output of text and line art, expandable paper capacity and memory, optional duplexer, can print banners up to nearly 4 feet long
Cons: Output quality of photos and other graphics is only average

Warranty
1 year limited on printer, 5 years limited on printhead