Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL

The diminutive but full-featured Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL pushes the colour laser price tag down to near inkjet levels. At only £345 (ex. VAT), it could accommodate a small workgroup, and it prints surprisingly quickly. Other Ethernet-equipped colour lasers cost more; for example, the Dell 3100cn costs over £400 (ex. VAT), as does the Brother HL-2700CN. And Konica Minolta is sending this machine into photo territory, where no colour laser has gone before: it has fitted a PictBridge port into the front of the printer so that you can plug in and print straight from a compatible digital camera. Konica Minolta rates the print speed of the Magicolor 2430DL at 20pages per minute (ppm) for black-and-white and 5ppm for colour (as usual, higher than the performance in our tests), but the 2430DL did well against similar printers. However, although its 600dpi engine turns out prints that look fine for a colour laser, it can't hold a candle to high-quality inkjets -- no surprise there. You should think of the PictBridge port as an added convenience, not a sign of phenomenal graphics quality. Like any colour laser, the 2430DL's strength is its combination of good monochrome quality with quick, basic colour.

Design
At first glance, we couldn't believe that the tiny Magicolor 2430DL was a colour laser printer. How did Konica Minolta squeeze four toner cartridges and other essentials into a package only 43cm wide by 39.5 deep by 34.1cm high? Part of the secret is its four-pass design: four cartridges snuggle into a spindle that rotates and delivers toner to the single imaging drum, one colour at a time. The 2430DL is small and cleanly designed. It weighs 20kg with toner and drum installed and has two deep handgrips on the sides so that one person can lift it. The USB-based PictBridge port is embedded in the front next to the paper tray where it's easy to connect your camera's signal cable. A small, unadorned control panel sits atop the printer on a sloping edge, so your fingers can push the buttons easily. You can grab a handle to open the top section of the machine to clear paper jams or to change the imaging drum and the toner cartridges. The drum slides into place on pegs; you use the on-board menus to change the toner cartridges. Although adequate for a home office, the printer's shell and paper trays should be sturdier for a work space with multiple users. For example, we treated the paper tray's front door gently, but a hinge broke when we flopped the tray down to accommodate legal-size paper. The output tray, a flap at the printer's crown, also feels flimsy.

Features
The Magicolor 2430DL is sparingly equipped, but has enough capabilities to accommodate an individual or small workgroup. The buttons for navigating its LCD menus are clearly labelled and easy to operate, but we recommend you print the excellent menu map, from the Special Pages menu before descending into the system maintenance or network setup functions. Also, we wish the control panel's 2-line-by-16-character LCD were backlit. The basic configuration of the 2430DL doesn't include a lot of hardware. It has a single 200-sheet legal-size paper tray, and you can stack a 500-sheet paper feeder underneath the printer for a pricey £160 (ex. VAT) extra. The base memory configuration is only 32MB, enough for an individual printing ordinary documents but not to share on a network or to enable the PictBridge function. To print from a camera, Konica Minolta recommends upgrading the memory with an extra 128MB or 256MB of RAM. The system can hold up to 544MB, although we can't imagine a situation that would demand so much. Connecting the Magicolor 2430DL to a PC via the USB 2.0 port is simple. The 2430DL's Windows driver provides useful features, such as n-up printing to reduce and print multiple pages onto one sheet; the ability to print a watermark or an external file behind pages; and adjustments for contrast, brightness, saturation, and colour-matching. The duplex feature doesn't work without the optional £160 (ex. VAT) backpack-style duplexer, however. From a digital camera connected to the PictBridge port, the onboard LCD menus let you print n-up and tweak sharpness and brightness. But they don't support cropping or borderless printing, and you have to select images to print from the camera rather than from the printer's control panel. We tested the Magicolor 2430DL with two PictBridge cameras: a Pentax Optio S40 and a Minolta-brand Dimage Z3. We weren't able to get the printer to work with the Pentax camera. And just because it hooks up to a camera doesn't mean this printer will produce frameworthy photos -- but then again, no colour laser can. Still, the PictBridge port might come in handy for business or insurance purposes, such as printing an instant record of a car shunt. You can even print on glossy paper for, say, a newsletter. Konica Minolta ships the Magicolor 2430DL with almost-empty starter cartridges specified to print only 1,500 pages. Once you replace those with the high-capacity 4,500-page cartridges, which cost £54 (ex. VAT) for black and £95 (ex. VAT) each for colour, a page of black costs a reasonable 1.2 pence-worth of toner, while a colour page costs 7.5p. For comparison, the HP Color LaserJet 2550L costs about 1.1p per black page and 8.1p for colour pages, while the Brother HL-2700CN costs about 1p for black and 5.7p for colour pages. Here's an estimate of the Magicolor 2430DL's total per-page costs, adding in its inexpensive £109 (ex. VAT) drum, which is good for 45,000 prints: one page costs a total of 1.4p for black or 8.5p for colour.

Performance
Speed
The Magicolor 2430DL delivered respectable speeds for its price range. Although it didn't achieve the high throughput of the more costly Dell 3100cn, the Magicolor 2430DL did beat the pricier HP Color LaserJet 2550L. Its speeds nearly paralleled those of the similarly priced Samsung CLP-550. Quality
The print quality of the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL impressed us overall. It produced sharp, black text as well as any high-end office laser printer. Our test text prints looked free of rough edges and uneven weighting and were easily legible down to very small font sizes. Its weakest point, still well within acceptable bounds, was on greyscales, which printed too dark, lost detail and seemed to compress the number of shades available, giving the images a flat or two-dimensional look. The 2430DL did a reasonably good job on colour graphics, printing fine details, although colours came out too red and oversaturated, with blocky gradients producing rough transitions and shading. Keep in mind that even excellent colour laser graphics prints would merit a mediocre score in the inkjet world. Still, we'd hoped that Konica Minolta's bold move of installing a PictBridge port on this printer would signal that it produced top-notch colour quality. However, of all the colour laser printers we have tested, only the Dell 3100cn, to date, has received an 'excellent' rating for its colour graphics quality.

Service & support
Despite the fact that the Magicolor 2430DL doesn't cost much, you get a good customer support package. The standard on-site warranty lasts for one year, and telephone support is available between 9am and 5.30pm (calls charged at national rate). Two setup manuals in more than 20 languages provide little detail; for example, they don't cover installing toner cartridges. But the on-screen PDF documentation provides an in-depth, getting-started how-to, with thorough lessons about the printer's features. An on-screen reference manual covers Konica's PageScope network printer-management software, as well as the Mac, Windows and Linux drivers. The Web site offers downloadable drivers and manuals, plus email support and a searchable Knowledge Base.

Specifications