Labs

Konica Minolta's Magicolor 3100 is a larger, more serious-looking printer than its compact Magicolor 2350 cousin. It's also a single-pass printer, with its four toner cartridges arranged in a row inside the top cover. Like the Epson Aculaser C1900PS, this printer only just scrapes in under our £1000 price barrier by virtue of its ex-VAT price. All the other printers in our tests came in noticeably cheaper, so we were keen to see what this had to offer.

The print speed tests produced some interesting results. Printing from Photoshop was fast, and only two other printers managed to beat it in the 10-page text test. However, the QuarkXPress print speed results turned out to be the slowest of the bunch.

The print quality evaluation showed well-balanced colours, with no undue saturation or brashness and no colour bias. The less impressive aspect was the default halftone screen used by this printer, which was slightly coarser than we got from the other models. This would be a good choice for quick laser-based proofing to get a reasonably good simulation of the general

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appearance of a page. Unfortunately, if you want to make pages to simply impress a client, you probably need to force up the halftone count somewhat or use a different printer, as they might not understand why the halftone dots are a little more visible than they'll get in the final commercially reproduced job.

The benefits of pushing this to a significantly higher setting will be less than you might expect due to the printer's relative lack of sharpness with text and line art - the results weren't quite what we hoped for. This isn't something you'd notice at a glance, but although the print engine resolution is 1200dpi, very fine text appeared a little fuzzier than the output from other printers, and close parallel lines were slightly less crisp than they should have been.

It's certainly a workhorse of a printer: the generous 256MB of RAM supplied as standard should keep it printing when other printers start sputtering and gasping for more memory. It also includes duplexing as standard, which can be a very useful feature.

The low prices of some of the printers in our Labs test took us by surprise, but it does mean the Konica Minolta Magicolor 3100 is now looking a little pricey for what it delivers. True, its colour reproduction in its default state was better than we expected - in fact, it was generally among the best on test. It's also very well specified, ready to handle demanding DTP layouts straight out of the box. However, other aspects weren't so great: it handled the XPress layout test more slowly than the others, and the results it produced weren't quite as sharp. Bear all these points in mind if considering this device.