Konica Minolta's Magicolor 2430DL is a small but fully-featured printer that would certainly accommodate a small workgroup, and it prints unexpectedly quickly, plus Konica Minolta is launching this device into photo territory, where no colour laser has ventured before: it stuck a PictBridge port into the front of the printer to enable you to plug in and print straight from a compatible digital camera. Konica Minolta lists the print rate of the Magicolor 2430DL at 20ppm (pages per minute) for black-and-white along with 5ppm for colour. Even though its 600dpi engine turns out prints that appear fine for a colour laser, it wouldn't hold a candle to high-quality inkjets – not really a surprise. You ought to see the PictBridge port as an extra convenience, not a sign of exceptional graphics caliber. Like all colour laser, the 2430DL's effectiveness is its mixture off full monochrome quality along with speedy, elementary color.Initially, we could hardly believe that the very small Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL was a colour laser printer. Konica Minolta hae managed to fit four toner cartridges as well as other essentials in to a package just 16 inches wide by 14 high and 19.5 deep by utilizing a four-pass design: four toner cartridges snuggle in to a spindle that rotates and delivers toner to the individual imaging drum, one colour at a time.

The 2430DL is small and cleanly made. It weighs 45 pounds with toners and drum installed and it has two strong handgrips on the sides that lets one person lift it. The USB-based PictBridge interface is embedded in the front close to the paper tray where it's simple and easy to connect your camera's cable. A compact, unadorned user interface rests atop the printer on a sloping edge, accordingly your fingers can touch the buttons easily. You can pull a handle in order to open the top part of the device to clear out paper jams or to replace the imaging drum or the toner cartridges. The drum slips into position upon pegs; you make use of the onboard menus to switch the toner cartridges.

Konica Minolta furnished the Magicolor 2430DL moderately but with plenty of features for you to support an individual or small workgroup. The buttons intended for navigating the Lcd menus are really clearly marked and easy to manage, nevertheless we suggest you print the first-rate menu chart, from the Special Pages menu, ahead of descending into the system servicing or network setup functions. Additionally, we wish the control panel's 2-line-by-16-character Liquid crystal display had been backlit.

The standard settings of the 2430DL don't contain a great deal of hardware. It includes a solitary, 200-sheet, legal-size paper tray and you may add a 500-sheet document feeder under the printer. The standard memory configuration is merely 32MB, sufficient for an individual printing regular documents though not to share on a network or to permit the PictBridge function. To print from a camera, Konica Minolta advises upgrading the memory with an additional 128MB or 256MB of Ram. The system can support up to 544MB.

Connecting the Magicolor 2430DL to a personal computer by means of the USB 2. interface is very simple. The 2430DL's Windows driver supplies useful options, such as n-up printing to minimize and print multiple pages onto one page; the means to print a watermark or an external file behind pages; and adjustments to contrast, brightness, saturation, and colour-matching. The duplex feature does not operate without the benefit of the optionally available backpack-style duplexer.

Via a digital camera linked to the PictBridge interface, the onboard Liquid crystal menus permit you print n-up as well as tweak sharpness and brightness. Although they do not support cropping or borderless printing, and plus you have got to select photos to print from the camera rather than from the printer's control panel. Simply because it hooks up to a camera does not indicate this printer is going to make frameworthy photos – however, no colour laser printer could.

Konica Minolta ships the Magicolor 2430DL together with starter toner cartridges specified to print only 1,500 pages. These should be replaced with the regular 4,500-page cartridges in future.

The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL presented respectable rates of speed for its price range whilst its print quality pleased us overall. It made sharp, black text as nicely as any high-end workplace laser printer. Our test text prints appeared free of rough edges and uneven weighting and were comfortably legible all the way down to very small typeface sizes. Its poorest point, although well within tolerable bounds, was on grayscales, which printed excessively dark, sacrificed fine detail, and appeared to reduce the amount of tones available, giving the photos a flat or two-dimensional look and feel.

The 2430DL did a reasonably decent job on colour graphics, printing fine details, though colours turned out too red and oversaturated, with blocky gradients creating rough transitions and shading. Bear in mind that even outstanding colour laser graphics prints would merit a mediocre score in the inkjet world.



Source by Theodore D Beach