Konika Minolta magicolor 7450 review

Konica Minolta's new magicolor 7450 is an imposing beast, there's no denying it.

Although, for what it delivers - namely A3+ as well as A4 colour PostScript printing - it isn't exceptionally large. It is also worth noting that it isn't exactly cheap either - although, again, it compares well at its end of the market. Prices were being finalised as we tested the printer, but we expect it to have a retail price of around £2495 and a street price of perhaps £200 less.

Konica Minolta describes the magicolor 7450 as a 'contone' printer, one capable of achieving - approximately at least - continuous tone colour output. Regular laser printing uses fixed-size laser spots to create larger 'halftone cell' dots in order to simulate different shades. The results of this are too visible to be described as continuous tone, but by using a process of pulse width modulation the magicolor 7450 is able to adjust the laser spot to 16 different sizes before resorting to the coarser halftone cells. This allows colours to be mixed on the page with much more precision than is possible with regular, unmodified laser printing. Rather than using collections of adjacent fixed-size CMYK spots to produce a particular hue, the printer engine can print different sized dots in the same place to produce something very close to true colour mixing. Ultimately, it still uses a form of halftone, but the result is impressively smooth.

The throughput speed is good, so for most use we doubt you'd have any quibbles. As a single-pass colour laser it prints colour as fast as black-and-white documents. Its engine is rated at up to 25 pages per minute for A4 and 13 pages per minute for A3. As with all printer speed claims this doesn't take into account the initial job processing time, but with our single-page, multiple copy document tests it didn't let itself down. Printing 10 copies took 39 seconds from hitting Print to getting the last sheet, a result which isn't the fastest on the block, but won't cause problems either. Printing full-page A4 images was reasonably fast - approximately 33 seconds for both our colour and greyscale image tests - and the results were easily good enough to use as in-house proofs.

This printer is the new range-leading model, replacing the magicolor 7300, and it is aimed squarely at designers rather than mainstream business use. It is fitted with 256MB of Ram, a good move for processing A3 colour PostScript work at 600dpi, and it can hold up to 1GB if necessary. It supports gigabit Ethernet, so large jobs won't be throttled back by data transfer issues. It has a maximum monthly duty cycle of 60,000 pages, a figure which should be far more than a design studio would need but might not suffice for a busy corporate office. Its standard paper capacity tells the same story; it holds 350 sheets before adding optional extra trays, as compared with the 600 sheets or more held by the more business-oriented competition. It also copes with heavier paper stock, up to 256gsm, and oversized A3 stock (311x457mm), all of which is very handy for making mock-ups and design proofs.

The per-print costs are in line with its competition; around 8p per page for 'average' A4 colour output. Of course, such figures are entirely dependent on the kind of work you print; producing lots of full-colour images on A3 will cost more whatever printer you use. We were pleased to see that the toner cartridges are high-capacity as standard; with a rated 15,000 pages for black and 12,000 pages for colour you shouldn't have to change these very often.