Product Reviews

We first reviewed the Magicolor 2300DL in Shopper May 2003, when we made it our Best Buy for its decent performance and fantastic image quality at what was a staggeringly low price for a colour laser printer, £763 including VAT. Today it costs less than half that price, confirming its position as the most affordable colour laser printer on the market.

Small and home office users have until now been forced to choose between an inkjet printer for colour output, a mono laser for fast printing or spending a considerable amount on a colour laser to achieve both. The 2300DL makes this third option more feasible. It's the only network

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colour laser that costs less than £500, and it sacrifices so little for its amazing price.

An Ethernet port is included as standard for sharing on a network, and it can be expanded with a second paper cassette, a duplex unit and even a scanner/copier unit. The 2300DL's mono print speed was unremarkable at 15.1ppm in our tests, but its high-quality colour prints were the fastest in our recent round-up of colour lasers (Labs, Shopper August 2004) and print quality was excellent. The polymerised toner gives a pleasing semi-gloss finish to prints, and the deep, rich colours avoid garishness. Business graphics revealed smooth graduated tones in both colour and monochrome prints, and photo prints were invariably vibrant and accurate. Its running costs are competitive at 1.8p per mono page and 8.1p for colour prints.

At a price that's barely more than you'd pay for a mono laser of the same quality, the Magicolor 2300DL marks the end for mono lasers, and will bring a splash of colour to offices large and small.

EXPERT'S VERDICT

"Good quality and expandability, and very inexpensive."

EDITOR'S VERDICT

"Puts fast colour printing within the reach of home and small business users."