Product Reviews

There are plenty of multifunction printers around and quite a few colour laser all-in-ones. There are rather fewer that have PostScript Level 3 emulation, duplex print and full fax functionality as standard. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 4695MF has all these features and as long as you have a strong back, it could be a good choice for larger workgroups or small departments.

The strong back proviso is important, as the machine weighs 55kg, so is a definite two-person, if not three-person, lift. It will also take up a lot of room on the desk, as it's more than 50cm cubed. Even with its substantial dimensions, it still has an output tray that sticks out from the left-hand side, increasing its width still further.

The Magicolor 4695MF has a pretty conventional design, with a 50-sheet automatic document feeder on top, set into the counterbalanced lid of its A4 flatbed scanner. The control panel at the front includes a four-line backlit LCD that shows status information and settings for copy density and number of copies. There's a number pad for fax dialling and large buttons to start black and colour copy jobs.

A 250-sheet paper tray sits at the bottom of the front panel - that's a pretty low main paper capacity for a machine in this class that has a high duty cycle and is intended primarily for workgroups. You can buy a second, 500-sheet tray as an option, but that kind of capacity should come as standard. A 100-sheet multi-purpose tray folds down from the right-hand side of the machine to handle special media.

Fold down the front panel and you have access to the machine's consumables. There are separate toner and print cartridges, as well as a waste toner container and,

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if you print more than 120,000 pages during the life of the machine, you'll need to replace the fuser, transfer belt and transfer roller, too.

Software installation is straightforward, although slightly complicated by the need to install different drivers for Mac OS X 10.2, 10.3/4 and 10.5. There are also separate drivers for the printer and scanner sections of the machine, but at least all the drivers are on the supplied CD, so you don't need to fiddle around downloading them from a website.

Konica Minolta rates the Magicolor 4695MF at 24 pages per minute (ppm), but this must be in draft mode and excludes processing time. Printing in normal mode and including the time taken to rasterise each page gives rather slower speeds. Our 10-page black text print took 47 seconds, or 12.8ppm, while the five-page black text and colour graphics print took 29 seconds (10.3ppm).

Switching to duplex mode, the speed dropped to 5.3ppm, which is 10.6 sides per minute. Copying is quite quick, with a full-colour copy printing from the flatbed in 32 seconds and a five-page black text document taking 23 seconds from the automatic document feeder.

The quality of prints using the PostScript Level 3 emulation was very good, with sharp, square-cut text and good bright colours for business graphics. When a printer produces vivid colours, it often doesn't manage photos well, but photo prints from this device came through looking reasonably natural, perhaps due to Konica Minolta's Simitri HD polymerised toner.

Scan quality was also good and although the flatbed has a comparatively low resolution of 600dpi, this should be more than adequate for typical office applications.

Toner cartridges come in capacities of 4000 or 8000 pages, and you'll only need to change the print units every 30,000 pages. Using the best prices we could find online, this gives costs per page of 1.39p for black and 7.62p for colour. These are both reasonable, although if you intend heavy use of the machine, where you'll have to replace fuser, belt and roller, you should add a further 1.3p per page for prints.

In all, the Magicolor 4695MF is a solid, albeit bulky, colour laser all-in-one. It's not as fast as the spec suggests, but produces quality prints at reasonable running costs.