Konica Minolta Magicolor 2500W review

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Verdict:

This is a simple printer with basic paper handling and no scope for upgrades. It's inexpensive, though, and even in heavy use it should prove quite affordable. As long as you're in no hurry for colour prints, it's a great choice.

Review Date: 15 Mar 2007

Price when reviewed: £177

Supplier: http://www.amazon.co.uk

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2500W costs little more than Canon's LaserShot LBP-5000, but the two printers are very different.

The 2500W is a compact four-pass device, with only a single, basic paper input. It takes four toner cartridges and a single drum, all of which arrive already in place. You need only open a few compartments and remove some packing material before the printer is ready to go.

Like most of the printers here, the 2500W comes with starter toners that don't last as long as the high-yield replacements you can buy. Their 1,500-page yield isn't too stingy, though, and the high-yield supplies 4,500-page yield is greater than that of most printers here. This is a fairly cheap printer to own, particularly if you print lots of black text.

The 2500W has only one paper input that can store no more than 200 sheets. You'll need to unload it to use envelopes or a stock of headed paper, and there are no orientation markings to help you load either correctly. You'll probably want to address envelopes by hand anyway, as this printer's driver has no envelope paper type and printing envelopes crumples their edges.

Fortunately, the 2500W is far more competent when printing on paper, delivering high-quality black text at nearly 19ppm in our tests. It's far slower when printing colour, but came quite close to its 5ppm rated speed in our mixed-colour speed test.

As with the LaserShot LBP-5000, dither patterns are fairly easy to make out in some areas of the 2500Wfs colour prints, but they're not too obtrusive and the quality is otherwise great. Colours in our test photos were natural and accurate. The shading wasn't always as well controlled as in the Canon printer's results, but our black-and-white image was far better.

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