Oki OKIPAGE (LED page printers)

What the OKIPAGE was

OKIPAGE was the brand Oki Data used for its digital LED page printers. Rather than a single machine it was a family of desktop electrophotographic printers spanning entry-level to workgroup units, marketed as an alternative to laser printers. When Oki Data debuted the OKIPAGE 14 series it positioned the printers around a low total cost of ownership, claiming a figure roughly 23% lower than leading laser printers. Because OKIPAGE covered many models, specifications differ from one to another; this page documents the facts that can be traced to Oki's own materials and archived manuals, chiefly for the well-documented OKIPAGE 14 series and the color OKIPAGE 8c.

How an LED page printer works

Like a laser printer, an OKIPAGE is electrophotographic: it charges a photoconductor drum, writes a latent image on it with light, develops that image with toner, and fuses the toner to paper. The distinguishing feature is the light source. Instead of a single laser beam swept across the drum by a rotating polygon mirror, the OKIPAGE uses a stationary bar of light-emitting diodes spanning the width of the page. Oki's service documentation for the OKIPAGE 14ex describes an LED stationary head of 4,992 LEDs driven to radiate the image data onto the image drum, using dry electrophotography as the developing method. Because the head has no moving optics, an LED printhead can be compact and mechanically simple compared with a laser scanner unit.

Oki's LED-printer heritage

The OKIPAGE line grew out of long-running LED-array work at parent company Oki Electric Industry. According to Wikipedia, Oki Electric claims to have made the first LED printer in 1981, and a commercialized variant, the OPP6220 of 1986, offered 240 dpi and 16 pages per minute. That heritage positioned Oki as an early adopter of LED-printhead exposure at a time when most page printers relied on laser scanning, and the OKIPAGE printers of the 1990s and early 2000s carried the approach into mainstream office and desktop products.

The OKIPAGE 14 series

The best-documented OKIPAGE generation is the 14 series. Oki Data debuted it as digital LED printers rated at 14 pages per minute and 600 dpi, reaching 600 x 1200 dpi for complex graphics when combined with Oki Smoothing Technology software, and every unit shipped with both a USB port and an IEEE 1284 bidirectional parallel interface. The press release listed the OKIPAGE 14e at US$449, the 14ex at US$599 and the 14i at US$849. Oki's service manual for the 14ex documents the stationary LED head of 4,992 LEDs, 4 MB of standard DRAM expandable by SIMM to 36 MB, emulations for PCL, IBM ProPrinter (PPR) and Epson FX, and an optional RS-232C serial board, with supported media running from A6 up to Legal plus common envelope sizes. Adobe PostScript Level 2 was offered on the higher-end OKIPAGE 14i rather than the 14ex.

The OKIPAGE 8c and color LED printing

Oki extended the line to color with the OKIPAGE 8c, which Wikipedia describes as Oki's first color LED printer. It used a single-pass tandem array of four LED/toner stations arranged along the paper path, so cyan, magenta, yellow and black were laid down in one pass. That tandem arrangement gives color output at close to monochrome speed, unlike four-cycle color printers that pass the page four times, once per color. Wikipedia notes the same printer was also marketed under the MICROLINE 8c name.

Place in printing history

The OKIPAGE family is significant as one of the most visible office and desktop applications of LED-array printing, a technology that competed with laser scanning through the 1990s and early 2000s and remains in use in later Oki printers and machines from other makers. LED page printers delivered comparable electrophotographic output while replacing the laser, spinning mirror and scan optics with a fixed diode array. Oki Data Americas later ceased sales of all Oki-branded printer hardware as of March 31, 2021, per Wikipedia, ending a long run of Oki-branded page printers of which the OKIPAGE-era LED machines were a part.

Reference scope

This page records only facts that can be traced to an authoritative source: Oki Data's press materials, an archived Oki service manual, an Oki product manual, or encyclopedic references. Because OKIPAGE was a product line rather than one model, specifications are attributed to the specific models they are documented for (chiefly the OKIPAGE 14 series and 14ex, and the color 8c) rather than generalized across the whole family, and any specification that cannot be sourced is omitted rather than estimated. It is not a buying guide and quotes no current pricing or availability beyond the documented launch prices and the 2021 sales cessation; the sources consulted are listed below.