Inexpensive colour printing used to be the preserve of inkjet printers, but
as prices have continued to drop, it’s now possible to pick up a colour laser
for under £150.
Konica Minolta’s Magicolor 1600W is compact for a colour laser, but is still
big – microwave oven-sized – compared to an inkjet.
It’s bigger still when in use, as the front cover pulls down to make the
paper feed tray and part of the top cover hinges out to make the output tray.
There’s no cover for the paper when loaded, so you’ll probably want to close
the machine up when you're not printing so it doesn’t attract dust.
The control panel consists of two buttons and six indicator lights, four of
which tell you when the toner in each of the colour cartridges is low.
This printer uses a carousel-style print mechanism, which means each colour
in a print is built up separately, before the complete image is transferred to
the paper.
This is a slower technique than inline print, which is now more common and
produces a colour page in a single pass, but is more expensive.
The Magicolor 1600W only comes with a single USB connection – the USB socket
sticks out of the right-hand side of the printer, rather than being less
obtrusive at the back.
Konica Minolta only supplies drivers for varieties of Windows – there's no
support for Mac or Linux.
Print speeds suffered a bit from the carousel print system, but we still saw
a top black print speed of 17 pages per minute (ppm) and a top-colour speed of
over 4ppm, both of which were close to the claimed figures.
Print quality was good for both black and colour prints, though black text
isn't quite as sharp as from other entry-level laser printers we’ve seen. Colour
graphics were bright and attractive, but the range of available colours made
photo prints a little over-vivid.
In its intended market of homes and home offices the drum or fuser units,
which have lifespans of 45,000 and 50,000 pages respectively, will probably
never need replacing.
The only other consumable is the toner itself and this gives a cost per page
of 2.6p for black print and 11.7p for colour. The black print cost is good,
though the colour is a little on the high side.
