Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL Review

Hot and Noisy

Though you won't have to do it during your first 1,500 pages, servicing the 2430DL is simple enough: Lifting the hood (which includes a fold-down, face-down output tray) reveals the carousel of four toner cartridges up front; as with other four-pass color lasers, this rotates to apply each shade of toner when making up a color page. The drum cartridge is just aft of this, with the fuser unit at the rear and transfer belt unit attached to the hood. Both pop-up status-utility software and the easy-to-navigate, not-too-easy-to-read (nonbacklit) two-line LCD guide you through pressing control-panel buttons to spin the carousel and replace an empty toner cartridge.

We experienced precisely one paper jam in our testing -- our first page, as it happened. Lifting the hood and removing the drum cartridge by its grab-bar handle revealed a sheet that had only fed halfway; tugging it out, replacing the drum, and closing the hood got us back on track.

Four-pass or rotary printers can't help making a thunking, clunking noise while moving the toner carousel into position for each layer of a color page; the Konica Minolta's thunks and clunks are quieter than many of its rivals', but accompanied by a background buzz or whir that makes the printer too loud for desktop placement near your phone. Of course, when idle the printer is not only silent, but drops from its peak 1,100-watt power consumption to 250 watts or less. Also, if you pounce on pages as soon as they hit the exit tray, you'll find them noticeably hot to the touch, but a few seconds' patience fixes that.

Wondering just how quickly pages hit that exit tray? We found the Magicolor 2430DL to be one of the fastest under-$1,000 laser printers we've tested, even keeping up with some single-pass designs for color jobs. Twenty pages of black Microsoft Word text took just 1 minute and 13 seconds, beaten only by the Lexmark C510 in our experience.

Our one-page Word business letter with spot-color company logo appeared in 24 seconds. Six full-page, white-background PowerPoint slides printed in 1 minute and 26 seconds -- and six dark-background slides took only four seconds more, versus the significant slowdown experienced with low-priced, less-memory-onboard models.

The Magicolor slipped from the front to the middle of the pack in our biggest printer test, a 55-page Adobe Acrobat document mixing text with color graphics that took 11 minutes and 24 seconds. But it printed 8 by 10-inch digital-camera images in a swift 33 seconds each -- at its default 1,200 by 600 dpi resolution, used for the above tests -- or 38 seconds at its peak of 2,400 by 600 dpi.

The photo job was the only time we saw a measurable time or quality difference when using the higher resolution; while it can't make inkjet-style borderless prints (the printable-area margin is 4mm or 0.16 inch), the 2430DL is a surprisingly sharp photo printer. Indeed, print quality in all our tests was first-rate, with no banding in solid-color areas and crisp text even in tiny font sizes.

We found no provision for manual duplexing, but otherwise Konica Minolta's driver provides a businesslike variety of N-up, watermark, and zooming/scaling options as well as tweaks for color brightness and saturation (or grayscale-only printing).

All told, once you get past the $499-is-really-$648 hurdle of adding memory, the 2430DL is a first-class choice for small, networked offices seeking both a color and black-and-white workhorse. Despite the PictBridge connector, we don't see it as an alternative to a home photo printer -- and we suspect businesses using digital-camera shots for newsletters or presentations are more likely to upload and adjust them on the PC rather than pursue direct-from-camera printing. But we like that the Magicolor will give neither you nor your wallet a hernia.

Pros:

• One of the smallest, lightest, and fastest under-$700 color laser printers to date
• Very good text and graphics quality

Cons:

• $499 base model doesn't have enough memory for high-res graphics
• The old starter-instead-of-full-toner-cartridges-in-the-box trick

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