Reducing User Intervention
28/10/2004
How Oki products increase staff productivity, reduce down time and keep the office tidy! And the printers just keep on printing...
Oil-less toner system
Understanding the issues of introducing such fast workgroup colour
printers, Oki realised that the user intervention for such fast
machines had to be cut dramatically. If the printer was to work
suitably in large corporate environments, remotely from the network
administrators, the printer had to be as self sufficient as
possible. Traditional colour page printers incorporate an `oil
roller' to introduce minute but very consistent amounts of oil to
the toner image on the paper prior to the final fusing function of
the printing process. The oil is used to ensure smoothness of toner
and therefore image and to put a slight sheen on the toner. Oki did
not want to loose the benefits of the oil in terms of image quality
but needed to dispense with the user intervention needed to
periodically change the oil roller. Oki has developed new colour
toner that incorporates an oil substitute within the toner compound
that can still function correctly within the electrophotographic
printing process. - So, no more oil roller changes. As an added
bonus, Oki engineering found that with some refinement of the
balance of the various toner constituent elements, that they could
vary the output image appearance. They have subsequently configured
the toner production process to give an extremely elegant, bold,
saturated image. This gives a high quality output to the printed
image. The resultant toner has also proved to give excellent smooth
results when printing on acetate media for overhead transparency
projectors.
Larger capacity toner cartridges
This speaks for itself. The toner cartridges now hold 10,000 pages
(C7000 series) or 15,000 pages (C9000 series) worth of toner (5%
coverage, A4).
Toner `fuel' gauges
Oki staff call them fuel gauges, call them what you like! They can
be found on the integral web server of the colour printer network
cards. Users can just type the IP address into their Internet
Browser and instantly be able to see and control various functions
of the printer. Here's what the user can see. Not only will network
administrators now know when the toner's running out, the printer
users can check too to ensure that there is a spare toner ready
Luckily our one looks quite full at the moment!
No waste toner bottle to empty
Again to reduce the user intervention, especially for remote
administrators, there is no waste toner container. What little
waste toner that is produced by the printing process is circulated
back into the toner cartridge. Again there's an added bonus - the
printer is kept cleaner and there's no possibility of toner
spillage.
E-mail alerts
Up to five e-mail addresses can be programmed into OKI Colour
Series network printers. The appropriate people can then be be
warned in advance, before the printer stops printing. For example a
' toner low ' message can be e-mailed 1000 prints before it runs
empty. Also ' paper low ' messages, ' output tray full ' messages
and ' consumable end of life ' messages can be sent. Yet more
examples of the thought that has gone into the design of Colour
printers frrom Oki.
