OKI has a range of colour laser printers in the C5000 series and, as the model number suggests, the C5950n sits at the top of that range. It's a narrow but deep printer, thanks to its in-line LED engine, in a case with slightly old-fashioned looking curves.

OKI has always used strips of high-definition LEDs in place of a laser beam to define images on the photoconductor drums in its printers. This makes them considerably simpler to make, while offering very similar quality to laser.

At the front there's a 300-sheet paper tray, with a pull-down multi-purpose tray taking a further 100 sheets of paper, transparencies or envelopes. At the top is one of OKI's slightly strange little control panels, with its shaped buttons and two-line, backlit LCD display. The printer comes with USB, Ethernet and parallel interfaces as standard.

Software installation is a little fiddly, as the C5950n driver isn't explicitly included on the supplied CDs and we had to download a specific one from the OKI site. The company does include a set of colour swatches, though, which is useful for colour calibration, though you have to provide your own calibration software.

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The printer is rated at 32ppm for black print and 26ppm for colour, but under test we saw less than half of this, with speeds of 14ppm and 12ppm, respectively. In comparison with rival printers, with similar speed claims, the C5950n comes out slower. These results are still quick for a colour laser, but it would be good if all printer makers could be a bit more realistic with their speed specs.

The perceived quality of prints produced by this machine depends on the kind of work you'll be doing with it. If its main task will be producing advertising materials or business-style reports, the vividness of its colours and strong, clean black text could be a bonus. If you're after rather more subtle shades, perhaps for photographic content, you may find the colours a little overdone and see a loss of detail in darker tones, as we did.

The C5950n uses four separate LED strips and toner cartridges, along with a transfer belt and fuser unit. The toner, belt and fuser all have different service lives, which makes maintenance a little fiddly, but the prices OKI has put on the consumables give low costs per page of 2p for black and just under 8p for colour.

The OKI C5950n is a reasonable colour LED printer, with low running costs though paradoxically quite a bit of maintenance, thanks to its three separate consumables. It's £135 more than the C5750n, too, while even on paper only 4ppm faster. If this little extra speed means a lot to you, the difference in price may seem fair. Otherwise, we'd save money and go for the cheaper machine.