A colour laser printer for less than £150 is a fairly uncommon animal and Konica Minolta Printers Magicolour 1600W is targeted, according to the company, at the college student and home office marketplace. This tends to make it a direct rival for several higher spec inkjet printers.
Coloured in black and cream, the unit appears extremely neat while closed, however to print from it you need to open up the top cover, and this becomes the output tray, and the front cover, which consequently can take up to 250 sheets as a paper feed tray – there is no multipurpose feed. Additionally, there is no cover for the paper while the tray is open.
The control panel features Ready and Error indicators, in addition to low-toner lights for each one of the four colours. There is a job cancel button and one more designated ‘Rotate Toner’.
The carousel mechanism uses one imaging drum, with each color set by rotating its toner cartridge into place.
The mains plug is at the rear, while the USB 2.0 connection on the right panel makes the cable obtrusive.
Konica Minolta Printers sells the Magicolor 1600W with all parts preinstalled, allowing you to plug it in and go. Although you must install the supplied drivers, it only takes a few moments. They supply drivers designed for Windows from 2000 onwards, but they do not support OSX or Linux.
A five-page black text document took 28 seconds (11.2ppm), and a 20-page run increased speed to 16.8ppm.
This is against a touted rate of 20ppm for black, so not far off the specification. The five-page text and color graphics document took 1:08 (4.36ppm), matching the company’s 5ppm claim, which is impressive.
The quality of end result from the Magicolour 1600W is exactly what you’d probably be expecting coming from a laser model. Black text is typically clean, although there’s a quite minor fuzz round character edges. For the majority of purposes, you will not notice this and additionally colour business graphics are really vibrant and solid. The brilliant colours created are great for eye-catching colour highlights, however when we printed a test picture, the colours could have benefited from a small toning down.
Along with the Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W printer toner cartridges, available in 1,500 or 2,500-page capacities – just 2,500-page for black – you have got to change the imaging unit after 45,000 black pages or 11,250 colour ones as well as the fuser unit after 50,000, no matter their colour content.
This is a good entry-level color laser printer, producing high-quality prints faster than many rivals in both categories. You can easily use and service it, and it stays compact when space is limited.
However, you shouldn’t consider a color laser as an especially cheap solution for printing color pages. Inkjet printers, although you may need to change the consumables with greater frequency, can in fact turn out less expensive. As a student or sole trader, these cost differences could be especially significant to you.
Konica Minolta Magicolour 1600W printer toner cartridges are available here.
