The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL is a small but full-featured printer that would certainly accommodate a small workgroup, and it prints unexpectedly fast, plus Konica Minolta is launching this device into photography territory, where no color lasers can be found. you’ve ventured before: you glued a PictBridge port to the front of the printer so you can plug it in and print directly from a compatible digital camera. Konica Minolta lists the Magicolor 2430DL’s print speed at 20 ppm (pages per minute) for black and white along with 5 ppm for color. Even though its 600 dpi engine produces prints that look good for a color laser, it wouldn’t compare to high-quality inkjet printers, which isn’t really a surprise. You should see the PictBridge port as an added convenience, not a sign of exceptional graphics caliber. Like all color lasers, the effectiveness of the 2430DL is its combination of full monochrome quality along with fast, basic colors. Initially, we could hardly believe that the very small Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL was a color laser printer. Konica Minolta has managed to fit four toner cartridges as well as other essentials into a package that is just 16 inches wide by 14 high and 19.5 deep by using a four-pass design – four toner cartridges snuggle into one spindle that rotates and delivers toner to the individual image drum, one color at a time.

The 2430DL is small and cleanly built. It weighs 45 pounds with the toner and drum installed and has two strong side grips that allow one person to lift it. The USB-based PictBridge interface is embedded in the front near the paper tray, where it is simple and easy to connect the camera cable. A compact, no-frills user interface rests on the printer on a sloping edge, so your fingers can easily touch the buttons. You can pull a handle to open the top of the device to clear paper jams or to replace the image drum or toner cartridges. The drum slides into position on pins; makes use of the built-in menus to change the toner cartridges.

Konica Minolta supplied the Magicolor 2430DL sparingly, but packed with features so you can support an individual or small workgroup. The buttons for navigating the menus on the LCD screen are clearly marked and easy to manage; however, we suggest that you print the first level menu table, from the Special Pages menu, before descending to the system service functions or network setup. Also, we wanted the control panel’s 2-line by 16-character liquid crystal display to be backlit.

The standard configuration of the 2430DL does not contain a large amount of hardware. It includes a single 200-sheet legal-size paper tray and you can add a 500-sheet document feeder under the printer. The standard memory setting is just 32MB, enough for one person to print normal documents, but not enough to share them on a network or to enable the PictBridge function. To print from a camera, Konica Minolta advises upgrading the memory with an additional 128MB or 256MB of RAM. The system can support up to 544 MB.

Connecting the Magicolor 2430DL to a personal computer via the USB 2 interface is very simple. The 2430DL’s Windows driver offers useful options such as n-up printing to minimize and print multiple pages on one page; the means to print a watermark or external file behind the pages; and contrast, brightness, saturation, and color scheme settings. The duplex function does not work without the benefit of the optionally available backpack style duplex.

Via a digital camera linked to the PictBridge interface, the integrated liquid crystal menus allow you to print n-up, as well as adjust sharpness and brightness. Although they do not support cropping or borderless printing, and in addition, you must select the photos to print from the camera rather than from the printer control panel. Just because it is connected to a camera does not indicate that this printer will take photos worthy of a frame; however, no color laser printer could.

Konica Minolta ships the Magicolor 2430DL along with specified starter toner cartridges to print just 1,500 pages. These should be replaced with regular 4500 page cartridges in the future.

The Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL featured respectable speed ratings for its price range, while its print quality pleased us overall. It produced crisp black text as well as any high-end laser printer for the workplace. Our test text prints appeared free of rough edges and uneven weights and were comfortably legible down to very small font sizes. Its poorest point, while within tolerable limits, was on the gray scales, which printed excessively dark, sacrificed fine detail, and seemed to reduce the number of available tones, giving photos a flat or two-dimensional look and feel.

The 2430DL did a reasonably decent job of color graphics, printing fine details, although the colors came out too red and oversaturated, with blocky gradients creating harsh transitions and shadows. Keep in mind that even outstanding color laser graphics prints would deserve a mediocre score in the inkjet world.