The Konica Minolta magicolor 2500W is at the low end of the price range for color laser printers, but it's also a little short on features.

We were first disappointed when we discovered that the 2500W ships with starter toner cartridges that can print up to 1,500 pages, rather than standard ones that can print up to 4,500 pages. This isn't all that unusual, to be honest, but it is still a negative in our book. On the plus side, toner loads from the front of the printer, so the cartridges are easy to reach. You can also clear paper jams from the front. The printer control panel lets you know when it's time to replace a toner or drum cartridge, and you can also check on the status of consumables and adjust printer settings from the supplied Status Display desktop utility.

The next disappointment was paper capacity. The 2500W ships with a single paper tray that can hold up to 200 sheets of plain paper, label stock, postcards, transparencies, index stock and envelopes. There's no manual feed slot, however, so if you want to print envelopes or non-standard paper stock, you'll have to remove the tray, load it up, and then switch back to standard paper when you're done. Again, this isn't a huge difficulty, but it can be annoying if you just want to whip off a few envelopes or transparencies. The output tray can hold up to 200 sheets.

The 2500W ships with 32MB RAM, which is not expandable, and it supports print resolutions of up to 2,400X600 dpi. We found output quality of both monochrome and color documents to be better than we expected, considering the printer's low price tag. Text quality was quite good, even at small font sizes. The output quality of grayscale and color images was acceptable for general-purpose use, but it fell a bit short for desktop publishing of newsletters, brochures and related content. Print speeds were good for monochrome documents but on the slow side for color documents.

The Konica Minolta magicolor 2500W color laser printer is an inexpensive but respectable choice for light-duty home and home office use, as long as your expectations aren't too high.


Pros:  Budget-friendly price, easy to set up, compact design with quiet engine, output quality is generally good
Cons:  Skimpy paper capacity, ships with starter toner cartridges, no built-in networking support

Warranty
1 year, exchange