Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300W Desk Laser 16ppm 110v

WHAT'S HOT: $700 for a color laser printer will make you think a zero fell off the price tag. But the bargain price is for real--and even so, the Magicolor 2300W delivers extraordinary print quality, producing sharp, crisp black text and bright, accurate, detailed color photos in our tests. Gray-scale photos also showed good detail, though they had a somewhat dotty texture. Minolta-QMS clearly intends the 2300W for individuals; it omits a control panel LCD and on-board menus in favor of letting the user control the printer from their PC.

WHAT'S NOT: We don't like the 2300W's paper-handling features. For one thing, it has no auxiliary tray, so you have to unload paper from the main feed to swap paper sizes. You can put only 200 sheets in the main feed, which is a hole on the side of the printer instead of a removable tray. We found adding paper inconvenient, and reaching into the slot to adjust the paper guides was awkward.

The 2300W prints text at 11.5 pages per minute, about 3 ppm slower than the average of recent color lasers we've seen but still plenty fast for an individual user.

The company's documentation seems haphazard and somewhat slipshod. Written instructions aren't improved much by the dark, crowded illustrations in the spiral-bound setup guide, which neglects details on installing the drivers. The on-screen manual is more thorough but has organization problems--for example, instructions for installing the optional $400 duplexer are in the troubleshooting section. Also, a status monitor that you can't turn off pops up on screen every time you launch a print job, which grows tiresome if you're printing a series of documents.

WHAT ELSE: Because the 2300W has no network interface, sharing it with a workgroup would require an awkward peer-to-peer setup; you'd be better off spending an extra $100 for the company's network-ready 2300DL. The 2300W's dark-gray shell looks cool and stately without calling out for attention. Minolta bundles the printer with CorelDraw Essentials; few color laser units come with graphics software, so that's a nice bonus.

UPSHOT: Freelance designers and other self-employed individuals who need inexpensive, proof-of-concept output and other casual color printing will love the 2300W.

SUMMARY

Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W Rated 16 ppm text/4 ppm graphics, standard 32MB of memory, 1200-by-600-dpi maximum resolution, 200 sheets input, 200 output. $700 800/523-2696 www.minoltaqms.com/usa.html