Product Reviews

As the prices of laser printers continue to plummet, most people kitting out even the smallest home office would do well to consider one. But for most offices, a multifunction device makes sense.

We found Konica Minolta's claimed print speeds of 20ppm to be accurate, but only once we discounted the time it took to process each job. The 2480MF took 18 seconds to produce the first page of a 50-page mono text document. Overall, printing took two minutes, 44 seconds. Our 50-page colour document took ten minutes, 22 seconds to print, which tallies with Konica Minolta's claim of 5ppm in colour.

Our 12-page Excel document, which combines colour tables and graphs, printed in two minutes, 56 seconds, again at 5ppm. The output was high quality: grey patches were solid and white text on a coloured background was free of ghosting, making the 2480MF ideal for occasional business graphics printing. Our full-colour photomontage was acceptable for a colour laser printer, although there was grain

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in all of our photos at the default setting of 1,200 x 600, and the colours were too pale. Raising the resolution to 2,400 x 600 slightly improved the grain and colour problems, but the result was still unimpressive. Our greyscale photomontage yielded slightly better results, but the 2480MF isn't designed for photo printing.

The unit also works well as a photocopier. Using the ADF, we copied a 50-page mono document in four minutes, 40 seconds, a rate of 11ppm. Copying a ten-page colour document took three minutes, ten seconds, or 3ppm. In terms of quality, we couldn't distinguish between the original and the copy for either set of documents. The 2480MF also works as a 600dpi scanner, although all of our photographic scans were too dark, making the 2480MF more suited to document archival.

The 4,500-page toner cartridges are good-value replacements for the 1,500-page starter cartridges that come with the 2480MF. All in all, including the cost of the toner and imaging drum, each mono page printed by the 2480MF will cost 1.4p. Colour pages will cost 7.9p each, underlining the fact that the 2480MF is for occasional colour use only.

The 2480MF will be a boon for small offices looking to increase their paper-handling capabilities. It isn't for those producing reams of colour documents every day, because of its slow speed, while the lack of integrated network hardware means it isn't a workgroup printer unless you use Windows Printer Sharing. But for small workgroups occasionally printing colour documents, the 2480MF offers good quality at a reasonable price.