Konica Minolta Magicolor 2490MF review

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2490MF is similar to the 2480MF, reviewed in What's New, Shopper April 2006, but it's equipped with a wired network port and a fax modem as standard.

Although it's big and fairly heavy, the 2490MF is comparatively compact for a colour laser multifunction peripheral (MFP).

Setting up this MFP is fairly involved. There's plenty of packing tape to remove before you can lift the scanner bed and manually release the scan-head lock. Two sheets of instructions are taped into place, along with a further two cards attached to internal shipping locks that you must remove. We wondered if we'd spotted all the packing material hiding in each of the MFP's nooks.

The setup program isn't particularly straightforward, either. It's fine if you want to connect the device over USB, but if you're using the MFP's network port, you'll have to add and configure a suitable TCP/IP print port manually in Windows. Although the printer leased an IP address on our network, using the control panel menu to discover the address wasn't easy. Once we had added a port manually, the installation completed without problems.

Like many MFPs with a network port, the 2490MF has limited support for making scans over the network. You can use the control panel to send a scan by email, but you'll need to connect by USB to use a more conventional TWAIN interface to capture documents. Konica Minolta's software is basic, allowing scans of only 150, 300 or 600 dots per inch (dpi) and displaying a tiny preview image.

The quality of the 2490MFfs scans was generally unimpressive. In photo scans, colours looked unnatural and suffered from significant banding. This is acceptable in an office-oriented device, but we saw a similar problem in our office document scans, along with a loss of contrast in light areas. Colour copies suffered from a similar loss of light detail, although for some reason mono copies exhibited the opposite problem, failing to preserve subtly different dark shades. A single colour copy took 36 seconds and a single mono page 19 seconds, while copying a 10-page mono document took 57 seconds.

Fortunately, the 2490MF is a fairly competent colour laser printer, almost reaching Konica Minolta's claimed speeds on our print tests. Pages from our colour test had an even finish with accurate colours, while black text was crisp and dark. Our black-and-white test photo was also impressive, with good greyscale shading and no colour cast. Colour photos were overly warm, though, and suffered from a visibly coarse dither pattern in places.

The 2490MF is a little cheaper than some other fax-capable colour laser MFPs, such as our current Best Buy, Epson's AcuLaser CX11NF. It also has reasonable running costs and produces high-quality prints, but it's let down by a poor scanner. As a result, the quality of its document scans and photocopies is no match for the competition. We'd pay extra for the CX11NF.