Océ, an international leader in digital document management and delivery, announced that it received a very favorable report and rating on many aspects of the Océ VarioPrint 135 printer from Buyers Laboratory Incorporated. BLI is one of the leading independent providers of competitive intelligence, testing and reviews for the office equipment industry, and evaluates hundreds of products every year.

Introduced in September 2011, the Océ VarioPrint 135 received an impressive five-star rating for image quality, job submission, ease of use and pre-flight and job preparation. The Océ VarioPrint 135 was subjected to an intensive custom test consisting of no less than 87,841 A4 size impressions spanning ten different media types, and demonstrated a very high level of performance across BLI’s extensive test suite.

According to BLI’s report: “Most notably, the device produced the best image quality in default settings of models tested to date, including smooth halftones and crisp text and fine lines. In fact, the unit is the first device to receive a five-star rating for image quality since BLI began its field testing of production units.” The report went on to note: “Equally impressive are the unit’s paper-handling capabilities, which make setting up custom media, switching between media, and managing changing media demands over the course of a day’s workload seamless and much less prone to error than with competing units tested by BLI.”

BLI highlighted a number of other five-star aspects of the Océ VarioPrint 135 in its report. “The advanced job build, integrated pre-flight processing and subset handling capabilities of the Océ VarioPrint 135 make complex workflows much easier to handle than other systems tested by BLI.” Ease of use was praised as well. “For print users, ease of use was another highlight for the device, thanks to its excellent job submission options, high-quality pre-press capabilities and user-friendly queue management capabilities. The Docbox capability, which is new to this VarioPrint product family, is very user friendly and offers extensive reprint-on-demand capabilities including advanced subset workflow handling capabilities.”

“Overall, the device is well positioned to compete in the light- to mid-production monochrome space, especially in those environments where operator time is a valuable commodity and workflows are more varied or complex than usual, where the Océ model’s ease of media programming and building complex jobs will allow the device to shine and truly differentiate it from other devices.”

“Océ has shaken up the highly competitive light production monochrome market with the introduction of its VarioPrint 135, incorporating much of the innovative technology that BLI has praised during its analysis on the company’s high ticket price mid-volume production portfolio,” says David Sweetnam, Head of Research and Lab Services EMEA, Buyers Laboratory Inc. .

Ap Stout, International Marketing Director of Océ Technologies B.V.: “We are very proud of the BLI assessment of the VarioPrint DP Line. The BLI test results confirm our initial design objectives of overall productivity through workflow integration, ease of use and unique print quality in a compact, environmentally friendly product.”