Konica Minolta magicolor 4750DN review

Konica's latest A4 colour laser targets small workgroups that want low-cost, high-speed printing but aren't prepared to compromise on quality. Konica's Simitri polymerised toner aims to satisfy the latter demand and is designed to fuse at lower temperatures than conventional toner, saving on power costs and CO2 emissions.

The magicolor 4750DN steps in as the replacement to the 4650 models. It looks good value as the price includes an integral duplex unit for double-sided printing. It also has a good turn of speed, pushing the 24ppm of its predecessor up to 30ppm for both colour and mono output.

The printer starts with a single 250-sheet lower tray and capacity can be upped by another 500 sheets with an optional lower tray costing around £180. You get 256MB of memory as standard and, unlike much of the competition, Konica doesn't sting you for upgrades as a 512MB stick costs around £85.

Printer driver installation is neatly handled by a wizard that discovers the printer on the network and loads the necessary software for you. There's a status monitor for keeping an eye on consumables and the printer's web interface provides information about job status, colour usage and page counts.

The large number of consumables results in above average printing costs. Standard toner cartridges return a mono page for 2p and a colour print for nearly 10p, while high capacity toner cartridges drop this marginally to 1.8p and 8.3p respectively.

The printer ships with 2,000 page starter cartridges so initial print costs will be the highest of all. We disagree with this practice, and to highlight these grievances our 235 pages of test prints dropped black toner capacity down to 80% in a matter of hours.

The 4750DN delivers on Konica's speed promises with a 30-page Word test document completed in precisely one minute. It also handled colour prints well, delivering our 24-page DTP style document and its collection of photos, graphs and charts in 48 seconds for another perfect score.

Patience is required for duplexing operations as it took over five minutes to print our 30-page document on both sides. After the first side was done, the page was snatched back for printing on the other side, which was followed by a 12 second wait for the next page to start.

Output quality was a mixed bag as text was razor sharp across a wide range of font sizes and the colour charts and tables in our reports were clear with no banding evident. The 4750DN isn't the best choice for printing photos as although the levels of detail were well above average, they suffered from a noticeable colour cast.

The PC Pro colour performance chart showed the printer was laying down slightly too much yellow toner and this occurred across all the various driver quality settings. If you want your colour pictures to pack a real punch then check out the similarly priced Oki C610n.

There's a huge amount of competition in the sub-£500 laser printer space and Konica's new magicolor 4750DN scores well for its high print speeds. It's easy to install and use but colour print quality is uninspiring and running costs are high.

Author: Dave Mitchell