Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300 DL

Colour laser printing becomes affordable with this value printer

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Price: £762.58

Manufacturer: Minolta-QMS

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Verdict

Pros:
Affordable and upgradable; Network connectivity as standard

Cons:
Fussy carousel-style toner refills; A little noisy and smelly

Overall:
At last here's a colour laser printer that workgroups and even a small office can consider buying without having to fight to justify the expense. With good-quality output, quick setup and low maintenance, the Magicolor 2300 DL shouldn't swallow up your office space or your budget

Alistair Dabbs, Personal Computer World 27 Nov 2002

Less than a year ago, we were hailing the arrival of sub-£900 colour laser printers such as Epson's Aculaser C1000.

But Minolta-QMS has just launched an even smaller footprint device at £649 ex VAT.

This means small offices and workgroups that lack the big budgets of larger organisations can seriously consider buying their own colour lasers for the first time.

Like other entry-level colour lasers, the Magicolor 2300 DL is tall to keep the desktop footprint as small as possible.

More unusually, the 200-sheet input tray is open at the left-hand side of the case rather than inside a cassette flush with the unit.

Next to this open section is the connectivity plate, with parallel, USB and 10/100BaseTX ports provided as standard, plus the power socket.

This isn't particularly attractive, but it ensures the paper tray and all the ports are easily accessible.

A large door on the right-hand side lets you clear any paper jams at the exit rollers, and printed pages emerge face-down in the 200-sheet output tray on top.

A door at the front provides access to the consumables including toner and waste toner bottle. The toner is loaded as four separate colour cartridges, inserted sideways into a carousel arrangement.

Although more compact and cheaper than in-line cartridge systems, this carousel approach is fussy to maintain and slows down printing.

You must close the door and fiddle with the printer's control pad to bring the right colour cartridge into position before replacing it.

That said, the control pad with its intuitive directional buttons and two-line LCD status window is simple to use. This is largely because there aren't a great deal of options to play with.

Similarly, the printer drivers on your PC are free of interface clutter and obscure options.

Apart from standard laser printer features such as N-up printing (to 16 pages), watermarks and form overlays, there is little else to worry over: no saved jobs, no proof-once options, and no cost-centre accounting.

Instead, the 2300 DL has been designed to be installed quickly and used immediately.

The print quality is much better than we expected. Text is clean and dark, with excellent legibility down to 3pt. General document colour is bright and punchy.

Complex artwork and photos turn out quite well, although too grainy to rival modern inkjet printers.

Yet despite some difficulty with very pale greys, which suffer from a tinge of cyan, the 2300 CL produces impressively smooth gradients, even in vector graphics.

Speed is another matter. In our tests, basic colour and black-only documents churned out of the printer at around 3ppm (pages per minute) and 12ppm respectively, which is acceptably close to the official ratings of 4ppm and 16ppm.

But this does not make it a fast printer by today's network mono laser standards, while most sub-£200 inkjet printers can output colour business documents faster than this.

On the other hand, paper capacity is greater; the consumables last longer between changes (up to 4,500 sheets), and it's instantly networkable.

You don't need special paper stock, and you can add a duplexer for double-sided printing with almost no show-through.

For documents containing complex graphic layouts, such as richly designed web pages or estate agent mailouts, neither mono laser nor inkjet can do the job in the same time at the same quality.

Other concerns with the 2300 DL include a fair bit of clicking and whirring when the engine is in operation, and the ghastly ozone smell pumped out of the vents on top.

Still, we have yet to find a colour laser that isn't noisy, and the pong was only noticeable because we were standing right over the unit throughout the testing. In a normal office setup, these issues would be negligible.

What matters more is that colour laser printing, which was once outside your budget, is now a genuine possibility without sacrificing print quality.

SPECS