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That makes it a good choice for a home office, small office, or workgroup—or indeed any individual user who puts a premium on professional-looking output.
A desktop-breadth personal color laser, the 2450 measures by by inches (HWD) and weighs 44 pounds. Physical setup is straightforward, and structure setup is largely automated, except that you can elect between installing a PCL driver and a PostScript driver. We installed both so that we could use PCL for our business applications suite and PostScript for our photo apartment.
Output essence is among the best we've seen for any color laser. The outstanding rating for handbook is the highest we give: It means the context is good enough for any purpose. More than half of our test fonts were simply readable at 4 points, and only one, a greatly stylized font, required 8 points. Only three color lasers include ever gotten a higher graphics rating than the 2450's very good. We saw no serious problems; hence, speculate it good enough for business product meant to etch a potential buyer.
For photos, the very good rating is as good as we've seen from a color laser and is tied only by the HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-in-One. various most laser printers, instead of printing each dot using an all-or-nothing approach for each color toner, the 2450 can print in 16 possible shades of each toner. That yields 4,096 possible colors for each printer dot (16 shades of cyan, times 16 shades of yellow, times 16 shades of magenta), which makes it easier to reproduce things like skin tones that change smoothly from one color to the next.
What matters most, of course, is the final result. The rating of very good for photos means that some though not all of the output was of true photo quality. The biggest dilemma was a slight failure of detail in small areas on some photos. In global, however, the quality is good enough to let you print output like a professional-looking trifold pamphlet without having to spend a accident at a print shop.
achievement, unfortunately, is not as impressive. On our business applications suite (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, .com) the 2450 handed in a rather slow total of 31 minutes, 14 seconds. Compared with fresh four-pass printers, it was notably slow on our Microsoft PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat files. On the plus side, the 2450 was noticeably faster than the LaserJet 2840, which had a total time of 43:19.
We also ran across a minor problem printing with the PCL driver. The printer briefly became unresponsive after printing our PowerPoint test file, refusing to print anything else until we turned it off and back on. Konica Minolta ingrained the problem and suggested using the PostScript driver as an immediate workaround. The partnership has since provided us with a firmware fix for the dilemma with PCL and says that it will incorporate it into future units. It again says that if you get a printer that predates that fix, you can download it from the Konica Minolta Web site.
For photos, the 2450 averaged a nice 57 seconds for each 4-by-6 photo and 1:44 for each color 8-by-10. It's one of the few printers we've seen with a controller that's smart enough to print our monochrome photo using black only, for a 43-second print time.
If your firsthand need is speed, this is obviously the wrong printer. But if you need strong-distinction product for text, graphics, and photos, you'll have a hard time decision a better choice among personal color lasers.
View the Konica Minolta magicolor 2450 and HP Color LaserJet 2840 All-in-One side by side.
Quality ratings:
body:
Graphics:
Photos:
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