Product Reviews

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 7300 is quite a rarity: an A3+ colour laser printer capable of high-speed output that doesn't cost the earth. £3000 may sound like a lot of money (in fact, you can pick one of these printers up from most mail-order outlets for closer to £2500), but you get a lot for your money - 79.8kg to be precise, so make sure you have someone else to help you unpack and install it.

As well as being heavy, the Magicolor 7300 is also huge. Measuring 63cm x 59cm x 56cm, it won't be suited to offices where space is limited. This bulk accommodates the printer's single-pass print engine, with the large area for toner and printheads that such a mechanism requires, in addition to two built-in media trays. Strangely, although they look almost identical from the outside, the top one holds only 250 sheets compared with the lower tray's 500. The upper tray is a multi-purpose unit for all kinds of media, while you're restricted to using only plain paper down below. However, both can take a wide variety of paper sizes all the way up to oversized A3, which is particularly useful as it means you can produce full-bleed A3 pages with crop marks. You can also add up to two additional media trays as optional extras should the need arise.

With heavy-duty printers such as this, longterm cost of ownership is just as important as the initial outlay. The Magicolor 7300's toner costs £68 for black and £110 per colour, and each cartridge lasts for up to 7500 pages, which by our estimation works out at about 5p per page in colour and less than 1p for black.

It's not easy to access all parts of the paper path among the Magicolor 7300's multitude of doors and compartments. This is indicative of the general slight awkwardness of the printer's design: the whole setup process is fiddly and time-consuming. You have to install each of the four separate print units along with the four toner cartridges. These are all held in place by a cumbersome locking bar. Adding optional extras is also quite tricky, although the CD-ROM provided with the printer contains useful videos to guide you through most tasks. And clearing paper jams is trickier than it should be.

In our speed tests, we found the Magicolor 7300 lived up to Konica Minolta's claims of producing 21 A4 pages per minute (ppm), which is reasonable for mono output. Better still, colour pages are produced at the same speed. A3 output

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is at an impressive 11ppm. The RAM capacity in the model we tested was the maximum 512MB; 128MB is supplied as standard, but it's worth upgrading, as it significantly reduces the time taken to process complex print jobs.

Even with its 512MB RAM and powerful 266MHz PowerPC processor, the Magicolor 7300 took over 20 minutes to print our most complex test file, a highly detailed PostScript 3 PDF file. However, the results were worth the wait. The image was crisp and clear, with a very fine halftone screen producing almost photo-quality output. Don't be put off by the printer's maximum 600dpi x 600dpi physical resolution. It uses a print process called Photo ART contone, which allows smaller toner particles, and hence more precise control at each pixel on the printed page. The results are truly excellent for all kinds of output, from text to line-art to photographs. The Magicolor 7300's output is also second to none when it comes to colour accuracy.

We tested the £350 duplex unit, which allows you to do automatic two-sided printing on all media sizes. This works well and makes the Magicolor 7300 a realistic option for producing leaflets and booklets. The duplex unit works in conjunction with a manual-feed tray, which we were surprised to find isn't included as standard. The manual feed is also rather limited, as it doesn't provide support for any media other than plain paper.

We found the default colour settings to be adequate in most circumstances. However, the Magicolor 7300 comes with ICC and ColorSync profiles so you can fine-tune it to match the output characteristics you desire using the Mac OS's built-in ColorSync software. There's also a wide range of colour settings within the print driver.

We weren't impressed with the layout of the driver software. It simply provides a pane within the standard Mac OS X print dialog called Printer Features. Within this you get a further four panes called Basic Features, and Detailed Colour Settings 1, 2 and 3. There doesn't seem much logic to the arrangement, and it feels as though the choices are rather limited. It's also frustrating that Mac users don't get all the utilities available to those running Windows, such as a Status Monitor application. Fortunately, you can get a web-based status read-out by entering the printer's IP address into your browser. The main way of interacting with the Magicolor 7300, though, is through its on-board control panel.

This is a surprisingly simple unit for such a powerful printer. It has just a handful of buttons, four status LEDs and a small two-line LCD panel. The advantage of this simple approach is that it makes the Magicolor 7300's menu system relatively easy to navigate and control, but like the driver software, it feels a little overly simplistic.

These minor quibbles are far outweighed by the Magicolor 7300's benefits, though. Its speed, low cost of ownership and excellent output quality make A3 colour printing a realistic option for any business.