Product ReviewsPrinters
The QMS Magicolor 2 provides fast four-colour printing on A4 sheets. The printer is available in two models: the CX, which ships with 24Mb of RAM and produces 600dpi x 600dpi output; and the EX, which has 80Mb of RAM as standard with an output resolution of 2400dpi x 600dpi. The EX also comes with a 130Mb internal IDE hard drive and a time-of-day clock. Both models can be upgraded to 384Mb of RAM using the three SIMM slots with 128Mb 72-pin 60ns SIMMs. The printer ships with 42 resident fonts which support 300, 600 and 1200dpi resolutions. Built around the Hitachi SL-1 print engine, the CMYK printing system can produce seven pure colours: red, green and blue being created from the other four. These colours are then dithered to produce an almost unlimited number of perceivable colours using a four-pass printing process. The printers are Pantone calibrated and support ColorSync 2.0. Setting up is very straightforward. A two-line, 16-character LCD message window gives you feedback on the printer's status. Seven keys allow you to view and alter printer settings. Four LEDs show the printer is ready, online, receiving data, or has a message displayed in the window. A resident Web page allows users to view the printer's status via the network using a Web browser. The Magicolor 2 has extensive network options, with 10Base-T and 10Base-2 Ethernet, serial and parallel built in as standard. An optional interface port is provided to install cards offering Token Ring, LocalTalk or additional Ethernet interfaces. An optional SCSI interface is also available to allow the connection of up to three external
Four QuickChange toner cartridges are used which are easy to install via the front panel and are colour-coded and keyed to prevent you from putting the wrong cartridge in the wrong place. The colour cartridges have a 6000-page yield with the larger, black cartridge producing 10,000 pages. The only other components you'll have to change - the fuser oil and the waste toner bottle - last for 12,000 pages, while the ORC belt has a 50,000-page life. The 133MHz RISC processor is one of the fastest in any laser printer, giving a 33% speed improvement over the previous model. The EX can produce an average of four pages per minute for colour work, rising to 16 pages for monochrome prints. In our tests, the EX took 3 minutes 18 seconds to print a 10.8Mb, 300dpi 24-bit Photoshop document. The print quality was excellent, although colours tended to look a little flat and dull. Page costs range from 1.8p per print for monochrome printing to 9.8p per print for full colour. These prices are based on 5% coverage for each colour, so they will vary from page to page. Advanced document processing features include the ability to produce thumbnail multiple pages on a single sheet and printer-based electronic collation. This allows the printer to produce the required number of copies of any document without the need to call on your Mac to do any work. Both these tasks can be performed using RAM, although it's advisable to have a hard disk installed for this process. Automatic jam recovery is another useful feature implemented by QMS where any pages in a job that jam in the printer are automatically re-printed when the jam has been cleared. The Magicolor 2 EX is a robust network printer that provides good-quality high-resolution colour printing. Its speed, networkability and low cost more than make up for any colour fidelity problems. The printer is aimed at business work groups as well as the graphics and DTP markets, and given its price it should do well. By Richard Spohrer |
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