A colour laser printer for less than £150 is a fairly uncommon animal and Konica Minolta’s Magicolour 1600W is targeted, according to the company, at the college student and home office marketplace. This tends to make it a direct rival for several higher spec inkjet printers.
Coloured in black and cream, the unit appears extremely neat while closed, however to print from it you need to open up the top cover, and this becomes the output tray, and the front cover, which consequently can take up to 250 sheets as a paper feed tray – there is no multipurpose feed. Additionally, there is no cover for the paper while the tray is open.
The control panel features Ready and Error indicators, in addition to low-toner lights for each one of the four colours. There is a job cancel button and one more designated ‘Rotate Toner’.
The carousel mechanism indicates there’s merely one imaging drum and each one of the four colours is set on this simply by rotating its toner cartridge directly into place.
In the rear of the unit is the mains plug, while the one data connection, USB 2.0, is annoyingly at the rear of the right-hand side panel, therefore the cable is much more obtrusive.
The Magicolor 1600W is sold with all the parts preinstalled, so that you can almost plug-in and go. In fact, needless to say, you must install the supplied drivers, however this is the work of a very few moments. Drivers designed for Windows from 2000 onwards are supplied, although there is no support for OSX or even Linux.
A five-page black text document required 28 seconds to finish, which is a rate of 11.2ppm and once we increased the page run up to 20 pages, the speed likewise accelerated to 16.8ppm.
This is against a touted rate of 20ppm for black, so not far off the specification. The five-page text and colour graphics document needed 1:08, which is comparable to 4.36ppm, and the company boasts 5ppm, so once again pretty good.
The quality of end result from the Magicolour 1600W is exactly what you’d probably be expecting coming from a laser model. Black text is typically clean, although there’s a quite minor fuzz round character edges. For the majority of purposes, you will not notice this and additionally colour business graphics are really vibrant and solid. The brilliant colours created are great for eye-catching colour highlights, however when we printed a test picture, the colours could have benefited from a small toning down.
Along with the Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W printer toner cartridges, available in 1,500 or 2,500-page capacities – just 2,500-page for black – you have got to change the imaging unit after 45,000 black pages or 11,250 colour ones as well as the fuser unit after 50,000, no matter their colour content.
This is definitely a good, entry-level colour laser machine, which creates good-quality print faster than a lot of its rivals in both laser and inkjet arenas. It’s simple to make use of as well as service and not really too large, in the event that space is at a premium.
You should not, nonetheless, think of a colour laser as being a especially cheap solution when it comes to printing colour pages. Inkjet printers, although you may need to change the consumables with greater frequency, can in fact turn out less expensive. If you are a student or perhaps a sole trader, these sorts of cost differences could be particularly significant to you.
Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W printer toner cartridges are available here.