Konica-Minolta 7450 Toner
magicolor 7450 Toner Cartridges

The Konica Minolta magicolor 7450 is a color laser printer designed for small or medium office or production environments. It has excellent print quality and support for large formats, but it is expensive. For a less expensive personal color printer, the Konica-Minolta 2430 toner printer is worth consideration.

The design of the Konica Minolta 7450 a bit bulky and heavy for what most would consider a small office printer. It measures 18.7 inches by 25.5 inches by 23.6 inches, and weighs around 133 pounds, so it won't be moving easily around the office. Most of its extra bulk comes from its paper handling capabilities. The printer supports large format sizes, including tabloid size, at 11 x 17 inches, and even batter printing up to 12.25 x 47 inches. This makes it better suited to graphic arts than a typical office environment, especially considering its high price, as a small office would likely be paying for features it doesn't need.

The magicolor 7450 comes with built-in networking, and can be directly connected via its ethernet port. Once connected, it is extremely simple to setup, as the printer's setup routine handles the whole process almost automatically. Paper capacity is decent, but falls behind some of the competition. The magicolor 7450 holds 350 sheets at a time, though it can be upgraded to handle up to 1,850 sheets with the addition of optional paper drawers. These upgrades are expensive, however.

Print quality is generally excellent, though somewhat mixed. Text quality is good, but a little below the text quality of some competing products in its class. Graphics quality is about average for a laser printer. Photo quality is where the Konica Minolta 7450 really excels, however, nearly matching the quality of a good inkjet photo printer, high praise for a laser printer. Colors are accurate and sharp, and very few artifacts or problems are apparent.

Overall, the Konica Minolta magicolor 7450's photo quality and large format support make it an excellent choice for graphics departments or production environments. Other offices will likely find its text quality lacking for day-to-day office use.