Every so often I check the toner levels on my Oki 3300, just to make sure I’m not going to run out when I need to print something urgently. It always seems to be the black toner that runs down quicker than most.
With all that said, the current cartridges have lasted around seven months, so I’ve had pretty good usage out of them so far! I went back to ezzytrade to get a black toner cartridge as they gave pretty good service last time round.
The time finally came to order a new set of ink cartridges for my OKI 3300. I posted a little while back about some issues I had with the OKI, but touch wood all has been running smoothly so far!
I decided to get my toner cartridges from a company called ezzytrade. They were pretty quick. Order on the day and you get them the next day. I also have an HP laser jet so when the time comes for that, I’ll consider buying from them again.
At the moment I only need to replace my black toner as it’s currently reading 0% left, whereas the other colours all have around 30-40% left. I’ll have to look into a high capacity black toner next time I think!
The great thing about the OKI cartridges is they all come with a returns bag which raises money for Save the Children.
Today saw me finally buy a printer. An OKI C3300.
I had originally ordered an Epson C1100, but the company I ordered through kept ringing to tell me that they were still awaiting stock. I cancelled that order on Wednesday last week and looked at some of the other suggestions that they’d made.
I eventually came back to the OKI C3300 on PC World and noticed the price wasn’t too different to ordering online. So I placed an online order, but specified to pick it up in store as I’m not going to be round much this week for a delivery.
Whilst the box and advertising paraphernalia says the printer supports Mac OS X, I’d like to point out that this is very limited support. They’ve got a very basic driver to make the printer work on OS X, but the driver and printer don’t support Bonjour.
For those non-mac readers Bonjour helps with networking and using equipment by discovering services automatically. It makes using things on a Mac very easy indeed.
Without support for Bonjour and lacking any intelligent drivers, this printer does not work on an Airport Express via USB, even though my Mac could pick the printer up. No matter how many different configurations I tried, it just would not work.
The next step was to try using the printer via ethernet. I didn’t want to plug the printer directly into my Mac Pro as there are other computers I wanted to be able to use the printer with. Ethernet failed to work initially. For some reason it couldn’t pick up an IP address and I ran into all sorts of problems trying to assign it one manually (what manufacturer assigns a password to the software set up without then telling you what it is!?).
After about forty-five minutes of messing around, I finally managed to get the printer set up and operational on my home network. It even works from a windows computer and my two Macs. I do wonder how those slightly less technically minded people would manage to get the printer operational however.
Update (Dec 17th)
I’m going to be ordering some new cartridges as I’m down to about 20% black and 40% on each colour. May as well order an entire set as it works out slightly cheaper.
The Oki 3300 uses four toner printer cartridges that, according to the sales spiel, have a page yield of 2000 A4 pages at coverage of 5% - the codes they use are Black: 43459340, Cyan 43459339, Magenta 43459338 and Yellow 43459337. I’ve not counted how many pages I’ve printed, but it’s quite a lot!
