Konica Minolta 1300W

Although the Konica Minolta 1300W laser printer is aimed at small business users, its low price means it's an affordable consideration for home users interested in print speed rather than print quality.

That said, laser printers are excellent at printing text. The 1300W's resolution of 1,200 x 1,200 dpi is good for a printer of this price and printed type is solid with crisp edges. At this resolution, it prints text at eight pages per minute, which is quite slow. However, reduce the resolution to 1,200 x 600 dpi and the speed increases to 12 pages per minute, only four pages short of the manufacturer's claimed print speed. What's more, the quality is indistinguishable between these two resolutions.

A4-sized photos take a bit longer - 22 seconds for one page at 1,200 x 600 dpi. We weren't that impressed with the quality though and it illustrates how much better inkjets are at printing photos. Printing large images at its highest resolution setting of 1,200 x 1,200 dpi will cause some problems as the 1300W only has 8Mb of on-board memory to render images, which limits what you can print.

While the 1300W is cheap and fast, it does have its flaws. Firstly, the output tray struggled to contain more than 15 pages and any ejected paper had a tendency to push out the paper already resting in the paper tray. Although it offers both USB and parallel connections, no cables are supplied. This is penny-pinching to say the least, as including one would have cost the manufacturer next to nothing.

It has its good points too. The printer itself is quite compact, especially with the paper feed folded away. There's a big set-up poster included, but the 1300W is so intuitive that it's hardly worth looking at it. The toner is easily replaced and there's a handy sticker with toner information. A new toner costs £56, which sounds expensive but works out to about two pence per page.

The 1300W retails for £159 but after a quick root around on the web, we found a few retailers selling it for around £140, which is a good price.

Contact: Konica Minolta 01784 442255
www.konicaminoltaprinters.co.uk