Konica Minolta Magicolor 1600 W – Colour Laser Printer Review

A color laser printer for under €150 is still a pretty rare beast, and Konica Minolta’s Magiccolour 1600W is aimed at the student and home office markets, according to the company. This makes it a direct competitor for some higher specification inkjet printers, so why go down the color laser route?

The answers are usually print cost and speed, and we’ll look at those two aspects a little later. This is a fairly small printer for a color laser, but a tad larger than a typical single-function inkjet printer – more the size of an all-in-one.

Finished in black and cream, the printer looks very neat when closed, but to print from it you have to open the top cover, which becomes the output tray, and the front cover, which then doubles as the paper input tray, holding up to 250 sheets – there is no multi-purpose feed. There’s also no cover for the paper when the tray is open, so you should probably tuck the paper away and close the device when you’re not printing to avoid dust settling on the paper.

The control panel consists of Ready, Error, and Low Toner lights for each of the four colors. There’s a button to cancel jobs and another one that says “Rotate Toner,” which is the first clue that this device uses a carousel-based laser engine.

The carousel mechanism means there is only one imaging drum and each of the four colors is applied to it by rotating its toner cartridge into position. These mechanisms tend to be cheaper to produce, but the technique means each color image has to be built up in four steps, which takes about four times as long as printing a single color.

The back of the printer is where the power outlet is, but the single USB 2.0 data port is awkwardly located at the back on the right side panel, so the cable is more intrusive.

The Magicolor 1600W comes with all components pre-installed, so you can almost plug it in and go. In fact, of course, you need to install the drivers that come with it, but that’s the work of a few moments. Drivers for Windows 2000 and later are provided, but there is no support for OSX or Linux.

The Windows driver is well specified and includes support for poster printing and up to 16 pages per sheet, as well as overlays, watermarks and reasonable color adjustment controls. There are also fields in the driver for duplex printing and alternate tray options, although none of these features are mentioned as options.

Customers considering this device will likely look to alternatives such as the Samsung CLP-315, which is very similarly priced, but the Konica Minolta device beats it on all of our speed tests. Our five-page black text document took 27 seconds to complete, a speed of 11.1 pages per minute, and when we increased the page run to 20 pages, the speed also increased to 16.7 pages per minute. This is in contrast to a claimed speed of 20ppm for black, so not far from spec.

The five-page text and color graphics document took 1:09, which is 4.35ppm, and the company claims 5ppm, so again pretty close. If you compare these speeds to a typical inkjet printer, such as B. the top-of-the-line Canon PIXMA iP4600, £90, the Konica Minolta machine takes about a third of the Canon’s time to print our five-page text and color graphics document, so even with the (for a laser) slow carousel mechanism you’re at it gain speed.

The output quality of the Magiccolour 1600W is what you would expect from a laser printer. Black text is generally clean, although there is very slight fuzz at character edges. For most purposes, you won’t notice this, and colored business graphics are bright and solid. The vivid colors produced are ideal for popping color highlights, although the colors would have benefited from a slight softening when printing our sample photo. There are good controls in the driver for this.

As well as the toner cartridges, which are available in 1,500 or 2,500 page capacities – only 2,500 pages for black and white – you’ll need to replace the imaging unit after 45,000 black and white pages or 11,250 color pages and the fuser unit after 50,000, no matter how high the color content. It’s entirely possible that a color laser printer aimed at this market will never reach 50,000 pages in its lifetime, but we’ve factored in the cost of these consumables to come up with a page cost of 3.71p for black and 13.4p for colour. The color cost is a bit high, but the black cost is comparable to similar machines.

verdict

This is a solid entry-level color laser printer that produces high-quality prints faster than many of its competitors in both the laser and inkjet sectors. It’s easy to use and maintain, and not too big if space is at a premium.

However, you shouldn’t think of a color laser as a particularly cheap option when it comes to printing color pages. Although you may need to change supplies more frequently, inkjet printers can actually be cheaper. If you are a student or a sole proprietor, such cost differences may be particularly important to you.

points in detail

• print speed 7

• functions 7

• value 8

• print quality 8

To press