Product Reviews

Not too long ago, colour laser printers demanded a significant price premium over their mono counterparts. And, with their four-pass engines, colour performance wasn't scintillating either. Much has changed, and now you can get a 16ppm single-pass colour laser printer with built-in duplexing and 10/100BaseTX Ethernet for just £2,495, in the form of the Minolta-QMS magicolor 3100.

The magicolor 3100 comes hot on the heels of Lexmark's C750n (see Reviews, issue 89, p121), also a single-pass laser design, but with a higher speed of 20ppm in colour and mono. That said, the magicolor 3100's claims of 16ppm in mono and colour are still not to be sniffed at and are significantly faster than four-pass designs, such as Kyocera's FS-8000C (see Reviews, issue 88, p149).

Minolta-QMS uses its own PRISMlaser (Photo Reactive Image Splitting Module) technology to achieve single-pass printing, and is capable of 16ppm output at 1,200 x 1,200dpi. The magicolor 3100 has four separate toner cartridges, each filled with Minolta-QMS's Microfine PhysicoChemical Toner, which claims to reduce wastage and also provide more uniform particle sizes. In addition, the toner, in combination with a chemical developer in the PRISMlaser engine, acts to reduce fusing temperatures and therefore reduce power consumption.

Aside from the PRISMlaser engine, the magicolor 3100 has a few other tricks up its sleeve. One of the most notable is built-in duplexing, which is a useful cost-saving feature, particularly for colour jobs. There's also built-in 10/100BaseTX Ethernet, USB and parallel interfaces, plus an impressive 256Mb of RAM. This can be upgraded using standard DIMMs to 384Mb, and there's also the option to add a 2.2Gb hard disk for £285.

To test the magicolor 3100, we kicked off with our 50-page letter test featuring a colour logo and some coloured text. The printer started well, achieving a near-perfect 15.8ppm. Quality was also good, although colours weren't quite as solid as the Lexmark C750n's. Text quality was also marginally less sharp, but it could still be called laser quality.

Plain black text was dealt with just as swiftly, and our 50-page text document printed at a faultless 16ppm. Text quality

The 12-page Excel spreadsheet test often causes problems, but the magicolor 3100 handled this very well, producing a wonderfully vivid yellow, easily matching the Kyocera FS-8000C. Small fonts were also clean, and graphs were solid and very professional looking. The only gripe would be that it took one minute, 15 seconds to finish the job, equating to 9.6ppm. This is around half the speed of Lexmark's C750n, although it's still twice as fast as Kyocera's four-pass engine.

Next we printed our 24-page DTP document containing a variety of fonts and numerous photos and illustrations. The magicolor 3100 finished in one minute, 33 seconds at 15.5ppm, with clear and colourful images.

We also printed a 12-page colour brochure in Adobe PDF format using the duplex function. Although it slowed down to 3ppm (6 faces per minute), the quality was exceptional. The magicolor 3100 also printed some of the best-looking A4 colour photos we've seen from a laser at this price.

The magicolor 3100 supports NetWare, IPP and TCP/IP among others, and we had the printer working happily over TCP/IP, albeit with some minor difficulties. There's also a browser-based management tool, which allows you to see comprehensive resource usage statistics, and allows remote access to all the features found in the operator panel. This is particularly useful, as the operator panel on the front fascia of the magicolor 3100 is clumsy to use. It's also not possible to limit the number of users who are allowed to print in colour.

Unlike Lexmark's single integrated toner cartridge design, the magicolor 3100 has separate toner, imaging and fusing parts. While this makes the printer more complicated, it doesn't actually affect running costs too much, thanks to sensible pricing. That said, print costs of 1.29p per page in mono (5 per cent coverage) and 6.95p per CMYK colour page (5 per cent per colour) are much more than the Kyocera FS-8000C at 0.56p and 3.1p for mono and colour respectively. In the end, print costs are still comparable to most colour lasers, and colour printing also works out cheaper than Lexmark's C750n.

The Minolta-QMS magicolor 3100 is a good colour printer for small businesses looking for a fast colour device. The ability to print excellent graphs and images is also a bonus, and the built-in duplexer is perfect for making flyers and brochures. It doesn't offer the best text quality, though, and it's not as intuitive to set up and manage as the Lexmark C750n. It also lacks the C750n's wide variety of optional modules. However, for a basic networkable colour laser, the magicolor 3100 is impressive, offering superb performance and fine colour image quality at a sensible price.