The Way We See It
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 |
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| Excellent |
| Good |
| Average |
| Poor |
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| Setup |
9.1 |
| Print Quality |
9.0 |
| Speed |
9.3 |
| Paper Handling |
9.6 |
| Supplies |
8.0 |
| Service/Reliabilty |
9.0 |
| TOTAL |
54.0 |
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In Short: The new Magicolor 7450 is a large format color laser printer from Konica-Minolta that replaces the Magicolor 7300 in their product line. The printer uses a single pass engine from Minolta capable of print speeds of up to 24.5 letter size pages per minute in color or black and white. The printer weighs in at a mere134 lbs. with supplies installed making this the lightest color laser printer capable of 12” x 18” printing. All four toners and photoconductors, (drums), load from the front of the printer. The Konica-Minolta 7450 can handle various sizes including letter, legal, tabloid, and custom sizes up to 12” x 18” from it’s universal 250-sheet lower feeder and paper up to 12.25" by 47.24" from the MP feeder. The 7450 can also handle paper as heavy as 95lb cover, (256 g/m2), from both standard input sources. Up to three additional 500-sheet lower feeders can be added that can feed plain paper and support standard sized up to 12” x 18”. The Konica-Minolta 7450 produces very good print quality rivaling even the best color laser printers available. We feel the output is suitable for most any application. In our testing the printer consistently produced very smooth colors and gradations on a variety of paper types and weights. Only when the type or lines got very tiny could you start to see some break-up. In our performance tests we found the 7450 to be one of the fastest overall in all but one test category. The Konica-Minolta 7450 ships with a fast Power PC7447A 733 MHz processor and 256 MB of RAM which we found to be adequate for printing tabloid size images even in the best mode. The Konica-Minolta 7450 includes PS3 & PCL6 emulations, a super-fast Ethernet 100/1000Base TX network print server, and parallel/USB ports. Several options are available like auto-duplex unit, additional RAM, (up to 1024MB), the 500-sheet lower feeders, and a 40GB internal HD for advanced job management and direct PDF or TIFF printing.
The Bottom Line: The new Konica-Minolta 7450 is a winner. It combines really good print quality and speed with outstanding paper handling versatility. For any office applications requiring good quality large format, (11” x 17”), color printing, or the need to frequently change between several different types of media, the Minolta 7450 may be one of the best options out there. The new Minolta 7450 color laser printer supports all current versions of Windows, Mac 9, OSX, and Linux OS.
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