Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL review

Gallery

Verdict:

The Magicolor 2430DL improves on the 2300DL in many respects, and is just as keenly priced. It, too, starts life with a Shopper award and we'll be interested to see if its price drops quite as dramatically as the 2300DL.

Review Date: 17 Dec 2004

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Konica Minolta's laser printers demonstrate how colour technology has become more affordable.

When we first reviewed the Magicolor 2300DL in May 2003, it cost £763 and won our Best Buy award. Since then, its price has more than halved, and we've given it our Best Budget Buy award twice.

This Magicolor 2430DL replaces the 2300DL in January 2005. The most obvious change is a reduction in size and weight over the outgoing model, but Konica Minolta has kept the price low and improved its specification: it's now a 20ppm mono and 5ppm colour device.

The printer's consumables are shipped in place so it's extremely easy to unpack, but the installation routine could be improved. Both USB and Network options in the setup program present you with the same installer, in which you must again choose either Local or Network. It's fairly misleading nomenclature because, unless you're accessing a third-party print server, you'll use a local TCP/IP port to access the printer across a network.

For its price the 2430DL is a strong performer and comes very close to the manufacturer's claimed speed figures. Its excellent greyscale printing is as good as any printer here, and text is smooth and solid black. Annoyingly, printing envelopes crumpled them.

Colour graphics and photographs are also very good, with faithful colours and plenty of fine detail, but a couple of minor niggles left us to wonder how well our review sample was calibrated. We found that colour text had slightly feathery outlines, and in our colour band test the red shades didn't seem to be perfectly in line with their neighbouring colours.

Prev Next

Get more reviews, tutorials and in-depth advice, every month with Computer Shopper.
Click here to try 3 issues for £1

< Previous Reviews : Printers Next >

Sponsored Links

Be the first to comment on this article

You need to Login or Register to comment.