Product Reviews

Surely, this can't be right - a full-colour laser printer for only £489? You'd better believe it, as Minolta-QMS takes the fight right to HP's doorstep with the lowest price we've yet seen. Quite rightly, the company is proud of the magicolor 2300W, and not only does it claim this to be the world's first personal colour laser but also that it has the smallest footprint in its class.

The catch is that the 2300W is a GDI (graphical device interface) printer, so it doesn't have an internal processor and relies on the host system to do all the legwork in preparing the pages. Furthermore, it has only parallel and USB 1.1 interfaces and can't accept a network card. That aside, the printer offers a fine set of features for the price. There's a 600 x 600dpi resolution with a 1,200 x 600dpi Fine ART mode, along with 4ppm colour and 16ppm mono print speeds. Printing costs are also reasonable, as the high-capacity toners turn out a mono page for 1.4p and a colour page for less than 7p at 5 per cent coverage per colour.

Installation on a network involves connecting the printer to a host system, installing the drivers and making it available to other network users. A local status monitor provides

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operational detail about the printer, including printed pages and the current filename. A bar chart shows all toner levels and remaining drum life - you can set a single notification threshold for all levels and the carousel for cartridge replacement is controlled from here.

For testing, we hooked up the printer via its USB port to a Pentium III/866 system with 768MB of memory and running Windows 2000 Professional. In the performance stakes, previous experiences with this company's GDI printers have left us cold, but the 2300W impressed, easily delivering the quoted speeds. A 24-page DTP-style document with plenty of graphics and colour photographs was completed at an average of 4.8ppm, while a 16-page plain-text letter was dealt with in a shade over one minute. However, if left on idle for a more than a few minutes, the printer tends to take about ten seconds to deliver the first page, having to warm up first.

Output quality for such a low-cost printer is good. Text was crisp and sharp with no signs of smudging, even down to the smallest font sizes. Graphics were also handled well, and you can expect charts and graphs in your reports to look good, as different shades of grey were clearly discernable with no cross hatching. Although not as vivid as the Oki C5300n (see p186), colour output has a clear vibrancy and the PC Pro Colour Chart showed fades with almost imperceptible stepping, while grey shades using equal mixtures of cyan, magenta and yellow were reproduced faithfully. Photo quality is also superb, with no banding and high levels of detail.

Overall, the magicolor 2300W is a remarkable achievement. It delivers low-cost colour laser printing to the desktop at a highly affordable price and yet makes no real sacrifices in print quality or speed.