Expert Verdict
There are no good words to describe OKI's MC342dnw's appearance. It's not very large, but its bulky dimensions and the grey plastic give it the appearance of something from the past decade, rather than the latest designed printer. The package of this printer comes with starter OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges, software and manual guide. The mono display and clunky buttons don't assist the effect, but the features tell a different story. It comes with duplex (double-sided) printing, as well as support for wired and wireless networks, mobile, and Google Cloud Print features, though OKI's Mobile Print Android app only prints, not scans.
The OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges set includes four colours - black, cyan, magenta and yellow. Though the MC342dnw is not very attractive, it does seem like it is made to withstand abuse - OKI certainly believes so, it comes with a three-year guarantee as standard. Even though there is no dust cover for the ADF, the scanner lid and 50-sheet duplexing automatic document feeder (ADF) seem well-made. While many MFPs allow you to elevate the scanner bed, this one allows you to tilt it upwards by a full 90 degrees, leaving the printer top totally unobstructed. Moreover, there's an automated lock to keep the lid from flying open when you tilt the scanner back.
There's a 250-sheet paper cassette at the bottom of the printer with the right paper orientation imprinted on the bottom, which is covered after you add any paper. This is one of the few laser systems we've tested that has a straight paper path that can be accessed by opening a hatch in the back. Despite having this feature, we could not print envelopes without them being crumpled. A 100-sheet multifunctional feed is located in the front and is secured in place by an extra blue catch hidden beneath the flap that conceals it.
The automated document feeder of this MFP produces a grating plucking sound as it takes up each sheet of paper, but it works swiftly, allowing the MC342dnw to copy 10 mono pages in 41 seconds and 10 colour pages in 48 seconds. At the default setting, mono copies were quite dark, but colour sheets were OK. Increasing the brightness by one stop improved the results significantly, however, the modification requires eight keystrokes and the setting reverts to its default after the MFP is turned off. The USB direct printing menu is similarly clumsy, but it does allow you to print several documents in a batch. Moreover, the direct scanning menu is more straightforward.
With the OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges, OKI rates this printer at 22 ppm in mono and 20 ppm in colour. It comes closer to its claimed speed than many competitors, thanks to a rapid time-to-first-page of just 12 seconds from standby. The black lettering was flawless, with razor-sharp edges and no splattering from the OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges.
The printer's extremely glossy toner gives graphical printouts a distinctive rich shine, thanks to the good quality OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges. The graphics and presentation slides in our test appeared fine, but they had a warm red-brown colour bias and a gritty texture in spots. The photos had comparable warm, attractive skin tones, however several of the prints seemed old due to the brown bias. We tried all of the driver's colour balancing options in the hopes of getting more balanced prints, but better results came from the PCL driver's Graphics Pro option, though they were not as perfect as we had expected.
The OKI MC342w Toner Cartridges are only capable of printing 2,200 black and 1,500 colour pages, resulting in expensive toner-only running costs of 2.3p per black page and 13p for full-colour pages. That's one of the most expensive colour lasers we've seen, and it's simply too much for an MFP with so little else to recommend it.