KONICA-MINOLTA NEW COLOR PRINTERS

[Anonymous]

Konica Minolta Announces New Color Lasers
konica
Minolta announced on Tuesday that it is replacing its magicolor 2400
Series of color laser printers with four new printers suitable for
small and home offices, with prices as low as $300.

Konica
Minolta announced on Tuesday that it is replacing its magicolor 2400
Series of color laser printers with four new printers in the magicolor
2500 Series: the magicolor 2500W, magicolor 2530 DL, magicolor 2550 EN,
and magicolor 2550 DN. The four models cover a range suitable for small
and home offices, with prices as low as $300. The company also
introduced a small office color laser AIO, the magicolor 2490MF.

All
five models offer four-pass color printing with an engine rating of 20
pages per minute (ppm) for monochrome and 5 ppm for color. That’s not
particularly fast by today’s standards, but it’s suitable for the small
or home office, particularly for those who print mostly monochrome
output.

All four printer models are small enough to fit
comfortably in a home office, at 13.4 inches high in their base
configurations with a 200-sheet input tray, and with a
16.9-by-15.6-inch footprint. (The 2550 DN is a bit deeper overall, with
a duplexer stretching the depth, but not the footprint, to 18.0
inches.) The primary differences between models lies in paper handling,
connection options, and where the processing takes place—at the
computer or at the printer.

The magicolor 2500W offers a maximum
resolution of 600 by 2400 dots per inch, a USB connector, and works
with Windows only, using the computer to process the image.

Next
up the line is the magicolor 2530 DL, which adds an Ethernet connector
and a PictBridge connector for printing directly from cameras—a useful
convenience in some kinds of businesses, like real estate offices that
need to print pictures of houses. It also adds a $229 duplexer option
for printing on both sides of a page, a $199 500-sheet second paper
tray option, and drivers for Macintosh and Linux as well as Windows,
though it too processes the image on the computer.

The magicolor
2550 models add the ability to print dots for each toner color in more
than one shade, an alternative to increasing resolution for improving
the look of photos and graphics. Konica Minolta says the resolution is
600 by 9600 dpi class, meaning that it’s the visual equivalent of
printing without varying the shading at 600 by 9600 dpi. More
important, the sample output Konica Minolta provided suggests that
these models can print something approaching true photo quality. Note,
however, that only the DN model includes a duplexer, as well as more
memory, which it needs for duplexing.

The magicolor 2490MF is
essentially a network version of the 2480MF that we’ve already
reviewed. Aside from the addition of a network connector, the key
differences are a standalone fax feature, the ability to scan to
e-mail, and a slightly faster scan speed, shaving two seconds off the
claimed speed for both black and white and color scanning.

Konica
Minolta says that the magicolor 2500W, 2530 DL, and 2550 EN are
available now, at $299 street for the 2500W, $399 for the 2530 DL, and
$499 for the 2550 EN. The magicolor 2490MF will be available later in
September, according to Konica Minolta, for $799, and the magicolor
2550 DN will be available in October, for $699.

[Author]

September 12, 2006 at 11:03 AM