Konica Minolta PagePro 1300W review

The PagePro 1300W is the cheapest laser printer we've seen. Quality isn't an issue either, with the crisp, dark text in our test document causing no complaints. Nor is it sluggish, with 50 pages filling the output tray in a respectable three minutes, 20 seconds, which includes 14 seconds of processing time.

Complex Excel spreadsheets proved no problem either. While the dithering pattern used to represent light shading in cells wasn't strictly accurate, text was legible. Darker shading revealed some vertical banding, as did solidly shaded areas in graphs, although white (unprinted) text in its midst was clearly defined. The results aren't of presentation quality, but they're fine for personal use. Speed dropped slightly to 9ppm here, although that's still tolerably quick for small jobs.

Our 24-page DTP document began to stretch the 1300W. As expected, images aren't its strong point, although we've seen worse from more expensive units. The banding came back to haunt digital photos and screenshots, but line drawings and simpler graphics fared better. On the plus side, it handled the multitude of fonts, sizes and shades of text flawlessly. After a 24-second thinking period, the document appeared at a speedy 17.6ppm.

Build quality is largely good, although we weren't impressed by the flimsy top-mounted output tray, which becomes precarious after around 70 pages. The input tray is easy to load, but we found it wouldn't take the stated 150-page quota of 80g/m2 paper without insisting there was a paper jam. The same problem occurred when printing on the reverse side of already printed pages.

There's no status LCD on the printer itself, but the PC status panel is excellent, if basic, offering a handy print-progress monitor. Not surprisingly, there are no standalone networking options either.

Running costs are more expensive than the A-Listed Kyocera FS-1020D (see issue 112, p72), at 1.15p against 0.68p, but you'll need to print plenty of pages to make up the £84 difference in prices. This makes the 1300W a great choice if you have more basic requirements.

Author: Ross Burridge