Product Reviews

The price of colour laser printing keeps coming down, and Konica Minolta's new Magicolor 2530 DL is one of the latest in its line of inkjet-challenging printers. This is a fairly compact device, built using the standard, slightly boxy but very practical physical design used for many of the company's other desktop colour lasers. It's intended to be small enough to fit comfortably on a desk rather than needing its own plinth in the office.

Like virtually all small-format laser printers these days, rather than having a standard removable paper tray, it has an open front and a tray-like shelf where you stack the paper. This can cope with up to 200 sheets at a time, but if that's not enough, there's an optional paper tray to add another 500 sheets to the printer's overall capacity.

The output was certainly good enough to keep us smiling. The print engine resolution is 600 x 2400dpi, and Konica Minolta's trademarked Simitri 'polymerised toner' is designed to produce particularly smooth tones. The real-world output stands up to the company's claims, with strong colours, and smooth halftones and gradients. All this is in line with the results we've seen from Konica Minolta's other colour laser printers, but it's very nice to see all this in a product that retails for just over £200 including VAT.

The printer boasts a USB port on the front for PictBridge printing of digital photos directly from compatible digital cameras. The photographic output results were good, but the inkjet competition does still have a slight edge in this respect. To be fair, there's

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not a lot of difference, but if you want a print that looks like a commercial four-colour page, colour lasers such as this one are best. If you want a print that looks like a regular photo, inkjets still have the edge over colour lasers - just.

The speed of this printer isn't going to set the printing world alight, but it's still perfectly respectable. The engine is rated at five pages per minute (ppm) for colour output and 20ppm for black-only work, betraying the fact that this uses a four-pass colour engine rather than a single-pass one. In our tests, the printer managed to come close enough to these figures for us to believe them, although, of course, this ignores the time required to process the print job in the printer's memory before passing the task to the engine. Again, while this wasn't the fastest printer we've seen, we had no complaints. The standard 64MB of Ram meant it handled regular colour work smoothly, although if you intend to print lots of DTP layouts with complex vector graphics and high-resolution bitmap images, you may find that adding to this helps improve its performance.

Changing the toner is simple: open up the front of the printer and the individual cartridges are presented in a vertical stack. Clearing jams is almost as simple: open the top and you can access the paper path. Duplex is an option for those who want double-sided printing. There's a 10/100Base-T Ethernet network port, as well as a USB 2 port on the back for those who prefer direct connections instead.

The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2530 DL is the latest evolutionary result of many years of printer development - and it shows. The only point to remember is its speed. If you need a printer to serve a busy and demanding set of users, it may not be quick enough for you. However, it has a monthly duty cycle of up to 35,000 pages, and it still runs at a perfectly respectable pace. Of course, it also outstrips most inkjet printers. And that's where it stands to make its biggest impact - with those looking for a more robust and networkable colour printer than they've had with inkjet models, but without stepping up into a higher price bracket.