Printers Manuals

Our office has used the Konica Minolta MagiColor 2400w for the past four years. We got it new because it was cheap and we were surprised at how well it worked.

The first thing to say about it is that is looks cool with the blue top. It’s a nice addition to the office and adds a bit of color to the place. Everything else we have are just beige boxes, so the blue makes a nice change.

One of the things we were most worried about with this was whether it would cope with four of us and our printing requirements. The box isn’t that big, in fact to look at the printer looks like one you would have at home. It’s about the same size as a personal printer, and about the same weight.

I needn’t have worried though because it has coped with everything we could throw at it for the past four years and hasn’t stuttered once. Between us we print between 10 and 12000 sheets a month. The MagiColor 2400w can apparently cope with 35000, so that might be why.

Setting it up was easy. All we had to do was unpack it, undo all the restraining tape and plug it in. The cartridges were already installed so we didn’t even have to do that. It has a USB connection which we set up on one of the spare computers and everything worked perfectly once the drivers were installed. The drivers didn’t take too long either, the CD which was in the box does everything for you, it’s just a matter of telling it where to put the files. Once done, we could access the PC through our network and print like that.

It prints pretty quick too, black and white printing is the fastest, at around 20 pages per minute. Color was a bit slower at 5 pages per minute, but the prints were good quality though. We don’t print many photos, but when we do that come out pretty good. We used to use an inkjet for them, but with the MagiColor 2400w, we can just print them as normal now.

Text documents come out really clear especially when printing at normal size. Graphs and office images come out very clear, the colors in the graphs look exactly the same as they do on the screen. Photographs was the most surprising thing, they are really good for a laser printer. They come out better on this, than on the old inkjet.

The Konica Minolta MagiColor 5450DL is another quality printer from the Japanese camera manufacturer. It builds on the successes of the 5430 and 5440DL series and improves on almost everything.

The 5450DL is a color laser printer that has a duty cycle of up to 60,000 copies per month, so is aimed directly at business customers. It is designed to handle everything the average office or workgroup needs with practised ease and never give any problems. The design is the standard functional cude shape and measures somewhere around 20 x 16.5 x 16.5, and weighin in at something like 60 lbs. This really isn’t a printer for the feint hearted or space limited office.

It performs well though. Producing monochrome prints at a rate of 27 pages per minute for both mono and color. While not the fastest on the market, it is fast enough to hold it’s own against the competition.

The print quality is good, at a standard resoltuion of 9600 x 600 dpi. The monochrome text reproduction is the real strength of the 5450DL. While printing images is never a laser printers strong point, the image quality is high enough for basic marketing or promotional materials, with only a little banding when translating full color pages into monochrome. Printing color is also reassuring as the machine produces great quality text and images from our test document.

The 667Mhz processor and 128Mb memory is horsepower enough for even the most demanding projects. It can be connected via USB or via network and doesn’t use the host PC protocol of it’s predecessors. It was found to be a bit of a shortcoming, which is why this iteration has it’s own processor and enough memory to cope with larger jobs.

The paper drawer is at the bottom fron of the machine and can handle up to 500 sheets. There is also a 100 sheet multi-purpose drawer at the topwhich can either be used for non-standard media, or in addition to the paper drawer to take it’s total capacity to 600. As with other Minolta models there is also the option to increase paper handling by 1000 sheets by adding a pair of 500 sheet drawers to the bottom of it.

Replacement toner is plentiful and most online retailers stock them. The standard toner comes with a built in drum and can print approximately 6000 pages each. At $99, they are competitlvely priced and offer a lower cost per page than many other manufacturers on the market.

The 5450DL is a solid, practical printer. It is ideally placed to fulfill the needs of the larger office or workgroup.

To see the total page count for the bizhub 250, press the Utility/Counter button on the copiers operation panel.  Then select the option for Meter Count on the screen.  The page count will be displayed.