The Burgeoning Of Lower-Priced Printers

Because of the wide range of price points, most, if not all offices now use color laser printers. Not too long ago, the smallest of offices could afford only inkjet printers when they needed color output. But today almost every vendor offers a color laser printer for well under $1,000. Prices have dropped at the high end as well, as many high-performance large-format color laser printers are sold for less than $5,000. Here we look at Konica Minolta's latest top-of-the-line magicolor 7450 and Oki Data's sub-$1,000 C6100n.

Konica Minolta Magicolor 7450
Konica Minolta's latest best-in-class color laser printer offers a terrific combination of performance, image quality and paper handling at an estimated street price of $2,999. The magicolor 7450 is a large-format color laser printer that's ideal for high-volume use with its 120,000 page per month duty cycle. It's also the perfect tool for producing in-house brochures and promotional pieces.

The magicolor 7450 single-pass printer offers 9,600 x 600 dpi-class resolution. The printer is powered by a 733MHz G4 processor. Standard memory is 256 Mbytes, which can be upgraded to 1 Gbyte if necessary. The printer outputs up to 24.5 pages per minute (ppm) in monochrome or color and has standard gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and parallel interfaces, and supports direct photo printing from PictBridge-compatible cameras. The printer supports PostScript 3 and PCL 6 printing languages and Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

A smart calibration system that features automatic image density control quickly and invisibly calibrates the printer for consistent color on every print. That, in conjunction with special polymerized toner, helps produce vivid color prints that rival traditional photographs in realism and color accuracy. Text, too, is printed with amazing sharpness.

The magicolor 7450 is easy for solution providers to set up, as it's smaller and doesn't weigh as much as many other large-format printers. The printer measures 25.5 inches wide by 23.6 inches deep by 18.7 inches high and weighs about 133 pounds with the consumables installed. Monitoring and maintenance also are easy. Solution providers can use a Web-based management utility to display real-time supply status and troubleshoot the printer from any location.