Another manufacturer that started out as document-copying specialists, Konica Minolta has now overseen its magicolor range of colour lasers through several permutations. The magicolor 8650DN is, at the time of writing, the current top-end A3+ model (with the 7450 immediately below), and it’s a very impressive beast indeed.

What’s most striking about the 8650DN is that it is not the base unit in a list of sibling products, each with a slightly higher specification than the others. The 8650DN comes, as standard, with automatic duplexing, 1024MB of memory (the maximum) and two 500-sheet paper trays. There are extras, such as a 60GB hard disk, but we found that the unit as supplied could handle everything we threw at it – and more.

Incidentally, like most of the other printers in this group test, the magicolor 8650DN uses a PowerPC processor – a PowerPC MC7447 64-bit CPU running at 1GHz to be precise. Admittedly, these things have a habit of being superseded pretty quickly, but for the present that makes it the fastest embedded processor in this group.

So how does all this grunt translate into action? Well, perhaps surprisingly, the 8650DN wasn’t the fastest printer on test, taking a fraction of a second over a minute and a half to print our standard Word document at draft quality. For the sake of fairness, by the way, each printer performed our tests three times, and an average of the resulting timings was taken.

The magicolor handled our PDF mixed image file with ease: at standard quality it took 31.57 seconds for A4 and 35.76 seconds for A3. The results, in terms of image quality, were pretty much the best on test too, with the photographic image gaining in depth in comparison with the other printers, and each of the blocks in the Kodak grey scale clearly differentiated.

Setup and administration of the 8650DN were also simple, with Bonjour facilitating the former, and PageScope – Konica Minolta’s browser-based admin utility – making short work of the latter. On the whole, it’s fair to say that the magicolor impressed us greatly.