Minolta-QMS PagePro 1300W review

Boxy, beige and grey, the 1300W laser printer won't win any awards for style - but that's not what it's for.

This is a sturdy, practical workhorse. Its in-tray folds out from the bottom of the device, and holds 150 sheets. Print-outs appear face down at the top in a tray that takes 100 sheets. It has no network connector, so you can't share the PagePro between several PCs, but it does have both USB and parallel connectors. This means you can hook it up to very old PCs that lack USB ports - a feature that's often overlooked.
Laser printers are renowned for their low running costs, but the Minolta helps to reduce them still further. In many printers, the drum that picks up toner particles and deposits them on the paper is built into the same unit as the toner cartridge. But a laser printer's drum typically lasts much longer than a toner cartridge - in this case, 20,000 pages, compared to the 3,000 or 6,000 pages the toner cartridges can manage. For this reason, the 1300W's cartridges are sold separately from the drum. Cartridges cost £42 or £69, giving costs per page of 1.4p or 1.1p, respectively. That's cheaper than our current Top 50 laser printer, the HP 1010, which costs 1.8p a page, and much cheaper than typical inkjets, which cost 2-3p a page.
Text quality at both 600dpi and 1,200dpi settings approaches perfection. Even the lines and bars in tables are crisp and even. The first page appeared in 14 seconds, and was followed at a speedy rate that bears out Minolta's claimed 16 pages per minute (ppm).
Should you need to print pictures, quality is acceptable. At 1,200dpi the grain of the picture is relatively fine, and detail is good. However, fine banding (horizontal stripes in the shading of a picture) is noticeable, and detracts from the overall impression.
Another tricky test is to print workbooks from Excel. Laser printers usually struggle with printing low-contrast text on coloured backgrounds. The 1300W produced clear results. Even tiny font sizes were easy to read against dark backgrounds.
The PagePro costs £20 less than the HP 1010, it's faster, it's cheaper to run - and output quality is excellent. It doesn't include fancy touches such as the ability to view the printer's status using your Web browser, but this is hardly essential for home use. Quite simply, if you print a lot of text, this small and economical device is the printer to choose. For all these reasons, it's our new Top 50 Best Buy laser printer.

Author: Nick Ross