Having paid £250 for this printer, I have found it to be an outstanding quality colour laser printer for home use.
To start by looking at it's size, the printer takes up much less desk space than my previous colour laser printer. It is 430 mm wide, 395 mm deep and 341 mm high. On the front of the printer is a fold down tray were you feed in the paper, which then comes out at the top. Above the paper tray is another fold down area where the toners go.
In terms of print QUALITY this printer gives an excellent finish with a semi-shiny appearance. Having compared it to printers costing over twice as much (such as the OKI 5000 series) the print quality is as good, in my opinion. Konica Minolta describe the print resolution as PhotoART-9600TM resolution (600 x 600 x 4) and I have to say that it's excellent.
The printer weighs almost 20 kg, and takes only a few minutes to set up from the accompanying instructions and CD ROM. A huge benefit, not often seen in a printer at this price, is that apart from parallel and USB connections, the printer also comes with an ethernet connection. This means that it can be direcly connected to a home network via an ethernet cable. Whilst this may sound a bit confusing, if you've got a home network you'll know that if a printer is connected to one PC, then even if you're using a different PC, the one that is connected to the printer must be turned on to enable you to print. Well, with this printer, if it's connected via the ethernet cable to the network, then you don't need to leave any other computers on - you simply print from the computer that you're using directly to the printer.
The main reason that I bought this printer was to print onto A4 glossy paper, as my previous colour laser printer wouldn't work on glossy paper at all. The results are great, but then again, the output is great even on plain paper. The printer has a 200 page paper tray as standard.
A few optional extras that I've not used include a duplex unit (which enables the printer to print onto one side of the paper, then turn it around and print the back too, without you having to manually turn the paper around. You can also get a second 500 page optional paper tray.
Toner life is relatively low at 2500 pages of each colour (at 5% coverage per page) before you need a new toner cartridge. As a replacement set costs in excess of £200 (almost the entire cost of the printer) it's almost worthwhile buying a new printer when you run out of toner. However, having tried some toner refills you can refill all the toners for less than £120, which is very worthwhile.
The only criticism I would have of the printer is the speed of printing. For £250, with excellent print quality, something has to give, and with this printer it's the speed. Full colour printing takes about 30 seconds from my own calculations, so a 200 page print job is likely to take over an hour and a half. Still, at this rate you won't need to buy the additional 500 sheet paper tray, as it'll take so long to run out of paper.
All in all I believe this printer to offer excellent qualty printing at a very reasonable price.
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25.08.2007 18:02
fab review. costly but quality!!
25.08.2007 13:48
Brilliant Job. Bravo!!!
25.08.2007 11:44
it sounds quite good, great review