Minolta-QMS PagePro 18N

The recent merger of Minolta and QMS means that the company has been able to submit more printers than most to this month's Labs. The 18N is the baby of the group, offering monochrome printing at a speed of 18ppm.

The relatively low price is betrayed by the printer's looks. With the paper output tray empty, as well as the standard tray, the 18N is one of the most compact printers on test. Fortunately, at 13kg, it's relatively simple to move around, unlike some of the other hulks in this month's Labs. It features a 66MHz PowerPC processor and 4Mb of RAM, which can be pushed to 68Mb using standard SIMMs.

For its class it's relatively quick, matching its claimed 18ppm text speed in Microsoft Word, and when printing mixed text and bitmaps this only dropped to 14ppm. The complex single-page test was completed in 37 seconds, and the 18N warmed up from sleep mode to print a page in 22 seconds. Considering it powers down to 14W from 310W, this is excellent.

Output quality is more impressive. The only faults we could find were some banding in highly detailed photographic areas, and a little blurring on background-shaded Excel test tables.

The toner lasts 9,000 pages at a cost of £95, a cost of 1p per page. This is slightly above average but reasonable considering the capacity per cartridge is lower than most of the other units on test this month. The combined 750-sheet total also reflects the SME environment the printer is aimed at: not a place pumping out reports every five minutes, but a smaller location that still requires network integration.

This junior workhorse comes with a network card installed as standard, although annoyingly the instructions for the card aren't integrated into the rest of the manual. Once retrieved, it's easy to configure, however: Minolta-QMS' proprietary PageScope software allows setup over TCP/IP, configuration and monitoring of the 18N in everyday use.

Overall the 18N is a reasonable printer. It's light on features but, despite being almost half the speed of some other printers on test, it still manages to outstrip three machines rated faster than it. This is an impressive performance for what is the cheapest printer this month, and means the Minolta is worth considering if you're kitting out a small to medium-sized office.