QMS MagiColor 330 GX review

Mono laser printers have dropped a zero off their price over the years, and colour lasers seem to be on their way to doing the same.

You can now pick up QMS' entry-level colour laser for less than £1000, for example. But here is a very different machine altogether: the MagiColor 330 is an outsize A3 networked colour laser which is capable of output so clean and colour-accurate, it could be classed as a digital colour proofer.

Although it will sit on a desktop without a problem, the MagiColor 330 is a seriously big printer which stands almost half a metre in height and weighs over 70kg once the consumables have been loaded. It's not unattravailable, though, encased in a modern stone-white plastic design with curved details. The main 250-sheet universal cassette is located inside the base and pulls out from the front, flat across the desktop towards you. However, you may end up making just as much use of the 150-sheet multi-purpose tray which extends from the right-hand side of the unit. Both trays can accommodate either A3 or A4 paper.

Sheets are output face-down into a large 250-sheet tray built into the top of the machine. The output tray doesn't need an extension to take A3 paper, but there's a little hinged stopper to keep sheets in place. In addition, a face-up output tray is located on the left-hand side of the machine, looking almost like a mirror image of the multi-purpose input tray. The face-up tray can be used for any job, but obviously suits thicker stocks for which a flat paper path is preferable. The MagiColor 330 can take paper up to 220gsm in weight.

Swinging open the front panel of the unit reveals a photocopier-like interior in which you access rollers and the drum from the side. The colour laser technology employed in the MagiColor 330 is rotational - that is, the four separate colour toner cartridges are supplied as tubes positioned around a single, large imaging drum. In principle, this can produce slower output than systems which put the toners in a line with a light-sensitive belt or use multiple drums, but we were happy with the MagiColor 330's speed. It's classed as a 4ppm colour, 16ppm mono printer, and in practice we were obtaining photo-quality A4 prints within a couple of minutes for each.

The toner cartridges are fully enclosed when not fitted inside the machine, and so don't spill coloured powder all over the place like some A3 lasers. That's not to say we didn't suffer from toner spill at all, but the system is much cleaner than many. Side-on access to the toners and rollers can make it awkward to reach paper jams, so QMS has designed the MagiColor 330 with some extra pull-apart features. Both the left- and right-hand panels of the unit can be swung open and pulled right out. That said, we didn't suffer from any paper jams during intensive testing.

Where the MagiColor 330 really comes into its own is with its output quality. In fact, when printing photo images at 1200dpi, the results were simply astonishing. Better still, the clarity and crispness of the printouts was bolstered by a level of colour accuracy we've not previously encountered in a colour laser. QMS provides four colour technologies, including built-in colour-rendering dictionaries and Pantone-matching tables, but our tests concentrated on the ColorSync-compatible ICC profiles bundled with the machine plus QMS' own Qcolor automatic correction system, which is also based on ICC standards. For colour accuracy alone, we were consistently achieving almost identical output from the MagiColor 330 as from a digital proofer costing twice the price.