Product Reviews

Konica Minolta's printer range goes from real budget-oriented devices through to digital print production systems, but what the average busy design workgroup wants is a workhorse colour laser printer that will produce accurate, pleasing results quickly. And the Magicolor 5570 is aimed squarely at that market. This is an A4 colour laser printer with a fairly high page-per-minute throughput, the ability to handle high monthly volumes, and a gigabit Ethernet port. The built-in paper tray can handle 500 sheets at a time and the output hopper won't fill up until more than 250 pages have come out. It isn't the smallest colour laser printer we've seen, but then it isn't aimed at the low end of the market.

When we put it to the test, we weren't surprised that it did well. Previous Magicolor models have impressed us, and this was no exception. The output looks uncannily like good-quality commercial offset litho printing at a very fine halftone size. For designers proofing print jobs for themselves or for clients, this is actually a better jobbing proofer than an inkjet because the final print quality and colour saturation are very close to professional four-colour work. It doesn't do edge-to-edge printing, which isn't surprising, but a shame nonetheless.

One thing that designers with colour-managed workflows should note: by default, the printer is set up to handle RGB as sRGB rather than Adobe RGB 1998, ColorMatch RGB, or any other print-oriented RGB colour space. Although the output is still impressive, you'll get slightly more accurate results - not to mention a broader RGB gamut - if you change the RGB source setting to something more suitable. However, don't take this as a specific criticism of this printer. First, its output was very good anyway; and second, because regular office output is likely to be from sRGB setups, this is a very common setting for colour lasers. Of course, if you don't have a colour-managed workflow, you may still want to make the change, but you shouldn't worry too much about it.

The colour imaging units are in line within the device, giving a single-pass

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printing process for colour as well as black-and-white output. This makes the speed of printing colour work impressive, although, according to Konica Minolta, not quite as fast as with simple monochrome output. Its rated printing speed is 30 pages per minute (ppm) for A4 colour work and 37ppm for black and white. Our tests showed that with simple jobs such as our text-only tests, it will turn out a set of 10 pages in a little over 30 seconds. For more complex work, it takes a little longer, of course, but it didn't struggle with our files. In short, its general performance is enough to keep a demanding print and production team happy.

The printer's control panel is large, well lit and easy to read, and the menu structure that it shows is simple and fairly easy to fathom. There's a lot that can be controlled here (for example, the RGB source settings), but for the most part, everything works as expected and as needed without adjustment. In any case, many options can be controlled on a job-by-job basis from the Print dialog options on your Mac.

Changing the toner cartridges is a fairly simple process. True, we did have a little trouble at first with lining up the sliding latches, but it's a secure system that should stand the test of time in a busy printing environment. The Supplies Status page that can be printed with a few clicks in the control panel is more useful than most. It shows the percentage of toner remaining on the four cartridges as well as the life expectancy of the imaging units, broken-down statistics for the printed pages, and the average toner coverage for the last job and all jobs, by individual colour. For basic project cost assignment, this information can be extremely useful.

There was one part of the printer that we weren't so impressed with. The manual-feed tray is a clip-on device that doesn't feel like it's really a proper part of the printer's components, and it proved to be fairly fragile. Our advice is to remove the unit completely before moving the printer.

Minor quibbles aside, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5570 is a great choice for designers in workgroups. It's a little more than you'd need if you're after a printer for solo use, but members of a team will get their prints with minimal delay. If you're more of a general office worker, this would still be a good choice, especially considering the options available: as well as the regular extra paper trays for high-volume printing, there are such things as job staplers for finishing jobs automatically. But even on its own, this is a capable device. OK, at £999 plus VAT without any extras, it isn't exactly a cheap printer, but it's fast, accurate and reliable.