Konica Minolta PagePro 5650EN review

There was a time when 40ppm printers were the sole preserve of large companies with oversized IT budgets. That time has been brought to a full stop by Konica Minolta this month with its PagePro 5650EN.

It's nothing exciting in terms of technology, but the speed on offer for the £175 price is nothing short of astounding. In our 50-page plain-text test we measured the throughput at a thunderous 40ppm.

It slowed with more complex material, dropping to 29ppm when printing the 12-page Excel test, but it still works out at an average that's 6ppm faster than the Lexmark E260dn - the next fastest overall. If that wasn't impressive enough, you also benefit from a comprehensive set of features: networked printing, a huge combined input capacity of 700 sheets, a 500-sheet output bin plus a bright, easy-to-use LCD panel.

Running costs are low per page too. The starter toner cartridge runs to 6,000 pages and although the replacement cost seems high (£128 and £158 for the standard and high-yield cartridges respectively), the capacity matches it. A massive yield of 11,000 and 19,000 pages ensures that in the busy offices where it's intended to be used the 5650EN will be both easy to maintain and cheap to run. After 30,000 pages, though, it's soundly beaten by the Kyocera FS-1350DN, which is why the latter will certainly be the better choice for smaller offices and workgroups.

As with the Kyocera, output quality can't rival the best on show: graphics are washed out and there's some coarse dithering. But if top-quality graphical output isn't an issue, there's little wrong with the text.

If it's a high-speed, high-capacity printer you're after, and you know you'll be printing a huge volume of pages, then the PagePro 5650EN will prove its worth in the long run. And that's why it takes the Recommended award.

Author: Jonathan Bray