Konica Minolta Magicolor 5550 review

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 5550 is a single-pass colour laser printer, aimed at office and small workgroup use.

As you might expect for the price, it's robust, with a maximum monthly duty cycle of 120,000 pages. It has a network port, and comes with PCL 6 and PostScript 3 print languages as standard.

The 5550 looks similar to other large Konica Minolta colour lasers we've reviewed, but it contains a redesigned print engine. It's quieter than much of the competition, mostly confining itself to fan noise and discreet whirs rather than the usual battery of clunks. There's a big screen, and a USB port that supports PictBridge, or USB-direct printing from storage devices.

The bulky 5550 is shipped with its consumables in place, and you need only remove some packing material before it's ready to print. It successfully leased an IP address on our network, but Konica Minolta's install program wasn't able to detect it. We used the menu to find the address and added it manually to the installer. Unlike Dell's Colour Laser Printer 5110cn (reviewed in What's New, October 2006), there's no option to limit access to colour printing.

This printer has a standard 500-sheet cassette and a 100-sheet multipurpose feed, which you need to clip on to the side. It doesn't seem particularly sturdy and has no orientation markings for envelopes. After much trial and error, we found the correct orientation and driver settings, and discovered that the 5550 can print envelopes flawlessly.

Konica Minolta says this printer can print black-only documents at up to 30 pages per minute (ppm), but this was not the case in our tests. Its quickest result on our 50-page draft test came using the PostScript driver, where it managed 24.8ppm; respectable, but some way short of the Dell 5110cn's 31.6ppm. In colour, however, the 5550 was one of the fastest colour lasers we've seen, recording an impressive 20.9ppm on our colour Normal speed test using the PCL driver. Even when PostScript printing, normally slower than PCL on complex jobs, it managed 13.7ppm on the same test.

The 5550's print quality was excellent across our tests. Text appeared solid black, with crisp outlines and no visible jaggedness. The 5550 is the only colour laser we've tested for some time that matches the photo print quality of Epson's AcuLaser C1100. Colour graphics printed with accurate colours and a uniform, satin finish that looked classy. Unfortunately, the 5550 struggled to print subtly different dark shades on our presentation slides, a glitch we've seen before in affordable Konica Minoltas.

The 5550's print quality is better than Dell's 5110cn, particularly in colour, but it's slightly more expensive to run and costs around £80 more. It's worth it if you want the best colour print quality, but the 5110cn is marginally better value.

Author: Simon Handby