Product Reviews

A quick scan through the reviews on the MacUser Web site would indicate that if you're after a PostScript colour laser printer, you'd be looking at a minimum outlay of around £1,600. So when Minolta-QMS told us it had a PostScript colour laser product for less than £850, we were keen to put it through its paces.

When the Magicolor 2350 arrived, any doubts we had were laid to rest. Not only is it the cheapest PostScript colour laser printer we've seen, it's also the most compact, at just 35.6 x 50 x 39.2cm - very roughly the size of two Power Macs side by side. Minolta-QMS is targeting this product as a replacement for existing office mono lasers: it costs about the same as an equivalently specified mono product, but throws full-colour printing into the bargain. This will certainly prove an attractive pull, particularly to those in smaller offices, as the 2350 takes up so little desk space - regardless of the colour issue.

Getting the printer up and running on an AppleTalk network couldn't be easier. Just plug it into your network, select AppleTalk in Print Center, and the printer will appear in the list. If you're running a TCP/IP network, you can use the simple interface on the printer itself to allocate an IP address or set it to use DHCP.

Dash of colour

It's just as well that the printer is so easy to set up , because additional Mac support is rather scant. The installer CD provides the necessary PPD and installs it in the appropriate location, but there are none of the utilities such as Status Monitor, Crown Print Monitor and set of Pantone colour matching tables that exist for Windows users. There's also an upgrade for the software on the printer itself included on the disc, but installing this is fiddly - you have to find the file and manually drop it on to your print queue. However, there are clear instructions for Mac users in the manual and on the CD, so we needn't feel like an afterthought as we do in documentation for so many other laser printers.

A handy feature of the 2350 is that you don't have to have a network to use it - if you're a single user, it works just as well if you connect it to your Mac's USB port. OS X's Print Center handles setting up a USB printer in almost the same way as an AppleTalk one, and it uses

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the same PPD file.

For office environments, colour lasers have numerous advantages over inkjets. First is the print speed. The Magicolor 2350 may not print as fast as some workhorse colour lasers, but it's a fraction of the size and a fraction of the cost. It performs impressively nonetheless. We got it to output an impressive 16 pages of black-only text in a minute, just one page less than the manufacturer's quoted speed. Minolta-QMS doesn't expect that people will want to print in full colour all the time, but instead that users will want occasionally to add colour to documents. This is just as well, as print speed for colour output drops to 4ppm (as each page has to pass by all four colour toner/fuser units). But even so this is much faster than most inkjets.

The second advantage over inkjets is consumables: laser toner cartridges last significantly longer than ink cartridges. Each of the 2350's four-colour cartridges lasts for approximately 1,500 pages at 5% cover. Bear in mind, though, that upkeep and maintenance is more of a chore for a laser, since there are items other than toner cartridges that need to be replaced at regular intervals, such as the waste toner bottle and the OPC drum cartridge. However, the 2350 uses a new toner technology that has wax in the toner, which eliminates the need for the often messy fuser oil used by most colour lasers.

The third principal difference between lasers and inkjets is the crucial issue of output quality. The 2350, like other PostScripts, will print PostScript output without the need for additional RIP software. Text output from the Magicolor 2350 is simply faultless. Edges are crisp, contrast is excellent, and characters are readable down to as little as three points. The Magicolor 2350 also provides excellent results for printing business documents and graphics, with faithful colour reproduction, no noticeable banding, and impressive clarity. What a colour laser won't do is provide photographic quality reproductions of your digital photos, but even so, the photo output from this printer is more than acceptable, thanks to the use of 'continuous tone printing' technology, which enhances photo output with smooth gradations and more natural-looking halftones. We were also unable to trip up the printer's PostScript 3 emulation engine, even with the most complex of PDF files.

Hot competition

For more demanding users, the standard array of optional extras is available, such as an additional 500-sheet input tray and a duplex unit.

Aside from the lack of feature parity between Mac and Windows, we can't think of anything to criticise about the Magicolor 2350. You would think that such a cheap colour laser would be limited in terms of functionality, but this product will be more than up to the task in even medium-sized offices. Minolta-QMS must have the competition worried.