The petite yet fully-featured Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL could easily support a small workgroup, and it prints unexpectedly rapidly and Konica Minolta is launching this unit into photo territory, where no colour laser has been before: it stuck a PictBridge dock on the front of the printer to enable you to plug in and print straight from a suitable digital camera. Konica Minolta quotes the print speed of the Magicolor 2430DL at 20ppm (pages per minute) with regard to black-and-white and 5ppm for colour. Although its 600dpi engine turns out prints which appear acceptable for a colour laser, it wouldn’t hold a candle to high quality inkjets – not really a shock. It is advisable to think of the PictBridge interface as an extra convenience, not a sign of exceptional graphics superiority. Like all colour laser, the 2430DL’s effectiveness is its mixture of maximum monochrome quality along with fast, basic color.At first glance, we could not believe the petite Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL was a colour laser printer. Precisely how did Konica Minolta squash four toner cartridges along with other essentials in to a package just 16 inches wide by 14 high and 19.5 deep? An important part of the secret is a four-pass design: four toner cartridges snuggle in to a spindle that rotates and provides toner to the only imaging drum, one colour at a time.
The 2430DL is petite and cleanly fashioned. It weighs 45 pounds with toner and drum installed and it has two deep handgrips on the sides with the intention that one person can easily lift it. The USB-based PictBridge interface is embedded in the front adjacent to the paper tray where it’s straightforward to connect your camera’s signal cable.
A compact, unadorned control panel is located atop the printer upon a sloping edge, and so your fingers can press the buttons without problems. You can take hold of a handgrip so that you can open the top portion of the unit to clear away document jams or to replace the imaging drum as well as the toner cartridges. The drum glides directly into location upon pegs; you employ the onboard menus to change the toner cartridges.
Konica Minolta furnished the Magicolor 2430DL moderately nevertheless with ample features to be able to support an individual or small workgroup. The buttons regarding navigating its Lcd menus are actually clearly marked and straightforward to use, nevertheless we recommend you print the extremely good menu map, from the Special Pages menu, ahead of descending in to the program servicing or network setup features. Furthermore, we prefer the control panel’s 2-line-by-16-character Liquid crystal display had been backlit.
The standard configuration of the 2430DL doesn’t incorporate a great deal of hardware. It includes a single, 200-sheet, legal-size document tray and you can stack a 500-sheet document feeder beneath the printer. The basic memory configuration is just 32MB, adequate for an individual printing normal documents but not to share on a network or to allow the PictBridge function. To print from a digital camera, Konica Minolta recommends stepping up the memory with an additional 128MB or 256MB of Memory. The system can support up to 544MB.
Attaching the Magicolor 2430DL to a Pc by way of the USB 2. interface is straightforward. The 2430DL’s Windows driver provides useful options, such as n-up printing to minimize and print several pages on to one page; the opportunity to print a watermark or perhaps an external file behind pages; along with controls regarding contrast, brightness, saturation, as well as colour-matching. The duplex element doesn’t function without having the suggested backpack-style duplexer.
Via a digital camera attached to the PictBridge interface, the onboard Lcd menus permit you print n-up and tweak sharpness and brightness. However they won’t support cropping or borderless printing, and additionally you have to pick photos to print from the camera rather than from the printer’s control panel. Mearly because it hooks up to a camera doesn’t indicate this printer is going to make frameworthy pictures – but then again, no colour laser can.
The starter Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL toner cartridges print only 1,500 pages. These can easily be replaced with the standard 4,500-page cartridges.
The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL supplied respectable speeds for its price range whilst its print quality impressed us overall. It generated well-defined, black text as nicely as any high-end business office laser printer. Our evaluation text prints appeared free of rough edges and uneven weighting and were comfortably legible right down to really small typeface sizes. Its poorest point, nonetheless very well inside tolerable bounds, was on grayscales, which unfortunately printed excessively dark, lost fine detail, and seemed to decrease the variety of tones available, giving the images a flat or two-dimensional look.
The 2430DL did a reasonably good job on colour artwork, printing fine details, although colours ended up too red and oversaturated, with blocky gradients generating rough transitions and shading. Remember that even exceptional colour laser graphics prints would probably merit a mediocre score in the inkjet world.