Konica Minolta 1650EN review

As the Samsung CLP-315 and Dell 1320cn demonstrate, it's possible to get a spectacular amount of colour laser printer without spending much more than £100. The Konica Minolta 1650en therefore has a tricky task on its hands, needing to balance performance and print quality without breaking the bank.

In terms of the space it takes up on a desk, it's more intrusive than the Samsung CLP-315, but it offers more features. Top billing goes to the Ethernet port, which makes the 1650en, on paper, a decent choice for workgroups.

It can't match the best budget colour lasers for speed, however, thanks to its four-pass colour printing. Black and white printing was respectable, at 21ppm, but pages with colour printed four times slower at just 5ppm.

The Samsung, then, is the 1650EN’s main rival. Despite having similar maximum noise pressure claims (Konica Minolta says the 1650en generates 50dB(A) at its loudest, versus Samsung's 47dB(A), over the course of a few hundred pages we felt the Samsung was the quieter machine in real use.

In a busy office this is a small consideration – against the background hum of work and air conditioning most colour lasers are acceptably quiet – but for a single user home office the Samsung is the more manageable.

There are few distinctions to be made in quality terms. The Konica Minolta couldn't quite match the best colour lasers in our business graphics tests. Its output was less refined, and our torture test of white characters on a red background showed a small amount of bleed.

Similarly, it wasn't outstanding for colour photographic quality, although it excelled in our monochrome photographic test. Over the course of our quality tests it was hard to make a useful distinction between it and the Samsung.

If you have a home office where a printer will be shared, this printer is the better choice, thanks to its wired networking. The only sticking point is value for money: the 1650EN may be slightly cheaper than the Samsung initially, but the cost of ownership rockets to £400 after a mere 1,000 pages and only gets more expensive. The Samsung, meanwhile, is far cheaper to run. It may have strengths, but the Konica is just too expensive to run to be worthwhile.

Author: Dave Stevenson