Magicolor 2450 Laser Printer
Review

Magicolor 2450
Company: Konica Minolta

Price: $499

http://www.qms.com

I have been reviewing printers for years, and there is some special place in my tech-heart for color laser printers. I have used many different brands over the years, some of which I have reviewed here at MyMac.com, but this would be the first Konica Minolta review for me.

Honestly, it’s been a long time since I used any KM product. They simply don’t advertise Macintosh compatibility very well. So when I read a press release about some of their new printers, I thought it may be a good time to correct that and get one of their printers into the MyMac labs and have a go at it.

The first is the Magicolor 2450, a color laser printer that positions itself in the SOHO market. How well does it hold up under everyday use? Let’s take a look.

The 2450 is a full color printer. It advertises 5PPM color print speed, but like most printer advertised print speeds, I found this not to be realistic. In fact, printing a full-page color photo took much longer than many other printers in this category. The output in color quality was very good, at least for color document printing. When it came to printing photos on glossy paper, I found it somewhat lacking, at least compared to some of the newer laser printers now on the market.

More troubling was the fact that, no matter what I did, I could not print a color photo from iPhoto 6 to the Magicolor 2450. After multiple attempts, nothing but a grey scale picture would emerge. I even printed to an HP color inkjet to make sure the problem was not with iPhoto. The picture printed fine on the HP, but not on the 2450. Opening the same pictures in Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s own Preview application, and then printing to the 2450, resulted in a nice color print. But color printing from within iPhoto never worked.

Document printing is where the 2450 really shone. It prints crisp text pages fast enough to please most offices, especially when directly connected via USB to the computer. However, when connecting the printer to my network (zero configuration needed) printing took much longer than I expected. Printing the same ten-page document via network printing to my Lexmark E322 was twice as fast both in print speed and the time it took the printer to “rip” the print job. In fact, the same ten-page document sent over a similar network to a seven year old HP LaserJet 5P was also faster than the Magicolor 2450. Once the 2450 actually received the entire print job, it seemed to take much longer than expected to output the printed-paper.

Noise is also a factor to take into consideration when purchasing a printer. Every laser printer I have ever used made noise, but few come close to the output volume the Magicolor 2450 does. In short, it’s too loud. Clanks and whirls seem amplified over similarly priced Laser printers in this price range, including the above mentioned Lexmark unit.

I really wanted to like this printer. And for pure document printing, when time is not an issue, I did. It does a good job printing. Color photo printing is very good as well, just very slow.

Specifications:
Print
Color: up to 5 ppm
B&W: up to 20 ppm

Resolution
9600 x 600 dpi-class Photo ART

Interface Support
Hi-speed USB 2.0,
Ethernet (10/100BaseTX),
Parallel IEEE 1284

Memory
128 MB SDRAM
Upgradeable to 640 MB

Paper Handling
Up to legal (8.5″ x 14″)
Adjustable 200-sheet multipurpose tray
Manual duplex printing (Automatic – optional)
Optional automatic duplexing
Optional 500-sheet cassette

Warranty
One-Year Exchange

MyMac.com Rating: 3.5 out of 5, mostly for price and print quality.