Konica Minolta Magicolor 1600W

Inexpensive colour printing used to be the preserve of inkjet printers, but as prices have continued to drop, it’s now possible to pick up a colour laser for under £150.

Konica Minolta’s Magicolor 1600W is compact for a colour laser, but is still big – microwave oven-sized – compared to an inkjet.

It’s bigger still when in use, as the front cover pulls down to make the paper feed tray and part of the top cover hinges out to make the output tray.

There’s no cover for the paper when loaded, so you’ll probably want to close the machine up when you're not printing so it doesn’t attract dust.

The control panel consists of two buttons and six indicator lights, four of which tell you when the toner in each of the colour cartridges is low.

This printer uses a carousel-style print mechanism, which means each colour in a print is built up separately, before the complete image is transferred to the paper.

This is a slower technique than inline print, which is now more common and produces a colour page in a single pass, but is more expensive.

The Magicolor 1600W only comes with a single USB connection – the USB socket sticks out of the right-hand side of the printer, rather than being less obtrusive at the back.

Konica Minolta only supplies drivers for varieties of Windows – there's no support for Mac or Linux.

Print speeds suffered a bit from the carousel print system, but we still saw a top black print speed of 17 pages per minute (ppm) and a top-colour speed of over 4ppm, both of which were close to the claimed figures.

Print quality was good for both black and colour prints, though black text isn't quite as sharp as from other entry-level laser printers we’ve seen. Colour graphics were bright and attractive, but the range of available colours made photo prints a little over-vivid.

In its intended market of homes and home offices the drum or fuser units, which have lifespans of 45,000 and 50,000 pages respectively, will probably never need replacing.

The only other consumable is the toner itself and this gives a cost per page of 2.6p for black print and 11.7p for colour. The black print cost is good, though the colour is a little on the high side.