Konica Minolta PagePro 1400W review

Gallery

Verdict:

This printer is one of the slowest and most expensive to run in this group, but its print quality is excellent. Konica Minolta's warranty, where the manufacturer comes to your home to swap a broken printer, makes this a good choice for occasional home printing

Review Date: 21 Aug 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Simon Handby

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Laser printers aren't often colourful, so the blue plastic on Konica Minolta's Page Pro 1400W makes a change.

It's not a particularly attractive printer otherwise. Paper is stored in a simple fold-down tray, which has no orientation markings for paper or envelopes, which were creased during printing. The tray is uncovered, so dust may gather on the paper stack between print jobs.

The printer arrives with its toner and drum already inserted, but they need to be removed and prepared before being slotted back into place. The supplied photoconductor drum is good for 20,000 pages, but you'll need to buy more toner after around 1,000 pages. Replacement toners have a 2,000-page yield and cost about £40, so each page will cost 2p even if you never replace the drum.

Konica Minolta's setup program is easy to follow. It installs a status-monitor application that stays in the Windows taskbar and reports on the printer's condition. This may not be worthwhile for a simple, locally connected printer, but it can be configured or disabled.

Like Konica Minolta's Page Pro 1350W, which we reviewed in Labs, Shopper July 2005, the 1400W produced a mild antiseptic smell when printing. It's a reasonably quiet printer in use, though we noticed that its cooling fan ran for a time after each print job had finished.

In our tests, the 1400W came very close to its rated speeds. Although these are modest, its quality was among the best here. The 1400W's solid black text was superb, with sharp, step-free outlines. With a comparatively high resolution and subtle dither patterns, it was able to print clear grey text with reasonably smooth outlines. Graphics were also impressive, with precise shading in illustrations and photographs, and very little banding.

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