Product Reviews

MFPs based on colour laser printers used to be too expensive for home users. But printer technology has become more affordable, and Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2480MF is the third entry-level colour laser MFP we've reviewed. It competes directly with our current Best Buy, Epson's AcuLaser CX11NF. Neither MFP is exactly cheap, but both fall within the budget of many small businesses and demanding home users.

The 2480MF uses the same print engine as other 2400-series products. These have been around for some time, so consumables are easy to obtain and reasonably priced. The 2480MF arrives with standard-capacity toners that last for only 1,500 pages, but you can replace these with 4,500-page supplies that should keep print costs down to 1.4p per mono page and around 7.5p in colour.

Although large, this MFP was easy to set up. Installing the driver was simple,

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but Konica Minolta's installer isn't as slick as others we've seen. During the installation process, we had to click past four Windows Logo Testing alerts.

The 2480MF's quoted print speeds are modest, but it came close to them in our tests. It peaked at 18.8 ppm when printing our 50-page draft document. Colour lasers often fail to reach their rated speed on our 24-page mixed colour document, but the 2480MF put in a solid 4.5ppm performance. It was slower when we used the highest print quality to print photographs: two 10x8" photographs took a minute and 17 seconds.

We were happy with the quality of all of our documents. Text was reasonably sharp, business graphics looked crisp and professional, and photos were detailed and natural. The 2480MF's scanner has a 600dpi maximum resolution, so we couldn't perform our 1,200dpi test. A4 previews and scans at 150 and 300dpi all took around 22 seconds. Office documents were captured well, but with under-saturated colours. Photographs were quite dark, and the scanner was very poor at capturing shade detail.

Despite sombre scan results and no fax capability, this is a solid MFP for general office use. At its launch, customers will be able to claim a free Silex network server from Konica Minolta's website, which network-enables all the 2480MF's functions, including the scanner - a generous offer. At this price, though, we'd choose the Epson CX11NF, which is faster and produces better results.