2006 Products Of The Year

IMAGING
Minolta Magicolor 7450

Color printing has become a standby for today's businesses—after all, a splash of color can add a splash of professionalism in today's competitive environment.

Slide Show: Top 10 Products Of The Year

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, earning it the nod as Product of the Year for imaging.

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 printer uses single-pass technology and offers 9,600 x 600 dpi-class resolution, all powered by a 733MHz G4 processor. The standard memory footprint is 256 Mbytes, upgradable to 1 Gbyte.

The printer outputs up to 24.5 ppm in monochrome or color and has standard Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and parallel interfaces. It supports direct photo printing from PictBridge-compatible cameras. Supported software includes PostScript 3 and PCL 6 printing languages as well as the Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

A price point affordable for most businesses and the ability to print on different sizes of paper stock make the unit a great option for many customer prospects, especially those seeking to eliminate expensive trips to the custom print shop.

The magicolor 7450 is easy for solution providers to set up, as it's small and doesn't weigh as much as many other large-format printers. The printer measures 25.5 x 23.6 x 18.7 inches and weighs about 133 pounds, with the consumables installed.

Monitoring and maintenance also are easy. VARs can use a Web-based management utility to display realtime supply status and troubleshoot the printer from any location. That translates into service revenue and also allows VARs to monitor supply inventories and offer supplies as needed, converting what would once be a catalog or retail sale into an ongoing revenue stream.

Konica Minolta's single-tier partner program is an exercise in simplicity. All partners receive marketing, pre-sales, post-sales and technical support. Complete product training is available online or in person. Partners are supported by dedicated account executives as well as systems field engineers and a dedicated inside sales representative at corporate headquarters in Ramsey, N.J. In addition, all have access to a password-protected Web site where they can learn about new offers, claim incentives and download support materials.

-- Marc Spiwak