Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W Cartridge Review

A colour laser printer for under £150 remains a reasonably unusual beast and Konica Minolta's Magicolour 1600W is targeted, according to the company, at the college student and home office market. This tends to make it a direct competitor for some higher spec inkjet printers.

Coloured in black and cream, the machine appears quite neat while shut, yet to print from it you have to open up the top cover, which in turn becomes the output tray, as well as the front cover, which then takes up to 250 sheets as a paper feed tray - there is no multipurpose feed. There is also no cover for the paper whenever the tray is actually open.

The control panel contains Ready and Error indicators, in addition to low-toner lights for every one of the four colours. There is a job cancel button and one more designated 'Rotate Toner'.

The carousel device signifies there's merely one imaging drum and each of the four colours is set onto this simply by rotating its toner cartridge straight into location.

At the back of the unit is the mains outlet, while the one data connection, USB 2.0, is annoyingly at the rear of the right-hand side panel, so the cable is more obtrusive.

The Magicolor 1600W is sold with all the parts preinstalled, so you can virtually plug-in and go. In reality, not surprisingly, you have to install the furnished drivers, however it is the work of a few seconds. Drivers designed for Windows from 2000 onwards are included, however there's no support for OSX and / or Linux.

A five-page black text document required 28 seconds to conclude, a speed of 11.2ppm and when we multiplied the page run to 20 pages, the speed at the same time increased to 16.8ppm. This is against a stated speed of 20ppm for black, so not far off the specifications. A five-page text and colour graphics document took 1:08, and that is equal to 4.36ppm, and the company claims 5ppm, therefore once more fairly good.
The quality of end result from the Magicolour 1600W is what you'd be expecting from a laser printer. Black text is typically clean, although there's a quite little fuzz round character edges. For most applications, you will not see this and additionally colour business graphics are really vibrant as well as solid. The vivid colours created are great for eye-catching colour features, although when we printed our test picture, the colours might have benefited from a slight toning down.

In addition to the Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W toner cartridges, available in 1,500 or 2,500-page sizes - solely 2,500-page for black - you will have to change the imaging unit after 45,000 black pages or 11,250 colour ones and the fuser unit after 50,000, no matter what their colour content.

This is definitely a sensible, entry-level colour laser model, which produces good-quality print quicker than a lot of its competitors in both laser and inkjet fields. It's not hard to make use of and service and not really too big, if perhaps room is at a premium.

You mustn't, nonetheless, think of a colour laser to be a especially cheap option with regards to printing colour pages. Inkjet printers, although you may have to change the consumables more often, can in fact turn out less expensive. If you happen to be a student or perhaps a sole trader, these types of price differences might be particularly crucial to you.

Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W printer toner cartridges are available here.