Despite the speed and convenience of Nextel’s i85s, we prefer
the Ericsson R380, with just one reservation—the Ericsson’s
steep price. It costs $600. For $300, we could buy a full-featured
cell phone and a Palm OS-based PDA. Freeing up a little more
space in our backpacks definitely isn’t worth an additional $300.The smartphone category shows a lot of promise, but we have
yet to see anything even remotely close to perfection.KONICA MINOLTA MAGICOLOR 2300W
AND THE WINNER IS...
APRIL 2004 MAXIMUMPC 21
T
he Magicolor wins more categories here, but the Epson
wins in the areas that are most important. Although it’s no
good for everyday text printing, the color print quality of the
Epson Stylus Color 2200 hoists it above every other color printer
available at this price. So for hardcore digital photographers,
the Stylus 2200 is a no-brainer. In fact, if you’re even thinking of
printing photos along with your text, this is your printer.
The Magicolor 2300W, on the other hand, simply brings
the price of color laser printing down to something regularconsumers can afford. But this in itself is a very impressive
achievement. If printing color photos isn’t your thing, you’ll
be much happier with the Magicolor 2300W’s high-quality text
output and blazing speed.
Although there still isn’t a single technology available to con-
sumers today that can serve color photos and text with equal
aplomb, color laser printing appears to be moving steadily
toward this goal much faster than inkjet technology. Join us in a
year or two to find out which one gets there first.nPhoto quality: Although you’d never mistake
the output for a photo, even on heavy card
stock, the color results from the Magicolor
2300W surpassed our expectations by far. The
quality is just shy of a fine color newspaper.
Blown-out highlights and significant stippling
and banding in gradients prevent the Magicolor
from being ideal for use with detailed photo-
graphs, but it’s exactly the kind of printer you
want for web pages, quick proofs, mock-ups
and, of course, presentations.
Winner: Stylus Color 2200Text quality: Lovely in a way
that inkjets still can’t approach.
Characters keep their optical
quality down to 5-point text,
after which the crispness drops
sharply. Impressively, text
remains legible, if not comfort-
able to read, down to 3-point text.
Winner: Magicolor 2300WFeatures: The
Magicolor 2300W
is a fantastic value,
finally bringing fast
color laser printing to
consumers and home
offices. Nonetheless,
it resides at the
low end of the cost
spectrum, and thus
it not only offers few
extras, but also cuts
corners. For example,
the printer lacks an
LCD screen, and
the 200-page paper
intake slot is awk-
wardly placed in the
rear of the machine.
Furthermore, the lack
of a network interface
on a laser printer like
this is tragic. Winner:
Stylus Color 2200Cost per print: Full color pages will cost you about six cents per page
assuming 5 percent coverage (though, again, photo prints will cost more
than this because of the amount of toner necessary to produce a pic-
ture). Winner: Magicolor 2300WFair quality color output —especially considering
it’s the cheapest color laser we’ve ever seen.LASER FRAGLAZER TAG
The output is still far from photo-quality, and
lacks full-bleed printing ability.
$700 (not including $100 rebate available at
press time), http://printer.konicaminolta.netMAXIMUMPC VERDICT 8
The Magicolor gave
us sharp text all the
way down to 5-point
type (shown here).
After that, characters
become a chore to
read. Still, this is
much better quality
than the Stylus
inkjet provided.Although it’s fine for most line art
and presentation-style graphics,
the Magicolor 2300W suffers from
blown-out details in prints from
color photographs.
Speed: It’s faster to fuse toner to
paper than to spray ink on a page.
How much faster? We printed a full
page of text (600dpi) in 15 seconds.
A 20-page text document took 1:
(600dpi). Our five-page Acrobat docu-
ment with illustrations took 2:47 (in
color, at 1200x600dpi).
Winner: Magicolor 2300W