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Issue #0634/2 - Refresh products offer good value for money and sensible toner cartridge yields in a scenario where the Pacific split is again noted.

With two additional models in its new range, Konica Minolta’s magicolor 2530DL and magicolor 2550, like the 2300W, are also refresh products but where the biggest difference is in the purchase price.

Falling from £345 to just £290, the magicolor 2530DL is a GDI printer like the magicolor 2300W but it adds a built-in network interface, has double the memory and is capable of accepting an auto-duplex option. Although still GDI, not offering PCL or PS3 emulations, the magicolor 2530DL does support Macintosh and Linux operating systems.

Konica Minolta
magicolor 2530DL

With not quite such a heavily reduced purchase price, down to £399 from £449, the magicolor 2550 further adds double memory again, the PCL6 and PostScript 3 emulations, with Unix compatibility, and a parallel interface.

All machines in the magicolor 2500 series feature the same 5ppm colour and 20ppm mono print engine and share the same consumables.

Cost of Purchase

As indicated in the previous article "More colour lasers - Canon, Konica Minolta and Xerox reinforce the sub-£250 entry-level category", Konica Minolta is unusual at this end of the market in making high capacity toner cartridges available. Although the machines ship with standard cartridges of 1,500-page capacity for each of the CMY colours, they ship with full, high-capacity black cartridges with a yield of 4,500 pages.

Replacement cartridges are available at both 1,500-page and 4,500-page capacities. But, note that a 1,500-page black cartridge does not exist.

It appears that the market is sharply split in its approach towards toner capacity—a split that appears to run largely along geographical lines.

We have commented on several occasions in the past that there is a major difference in market approach and pricing policies between US and Japanese manufacturers and this difference is again seen here.

It is the US manufacturers (Hewlett-Packard, Lexmark and Xerox) that are continually pushing for every cent of revenue and profit and have adopted the approach of reducing toner capacity so that customers are forced to buy replacement cartridges as frequently as possible.
By contrast, Japanese companies like Brother, Canon (mostly), Epson, Konica Minolta and Kyocera Mita, all offer cartridges with a healthy volume of toner.

Note that for this level of machine, the mixed mono/colour CPP over three years shown in the accompanying table is calculated on the basis of 2,500 pages per month; is based on the use of maximum capacity supplies; takes into account any standard, or starter, supplies shipped with the device; and also includes the cost of purchase. All prices are manufacturer’s recommended prices without tax.

Konica Minolta
magicolor 2550

The one major exception to the rule is Oki, a company that has introduced its most recent offerings (C3300n and C3400n) with a pitiful cartridge that offers a miserly 1,000 pages per colour, meaning very high running costs. And - there are no high capacity after-sales cartridges!

Canon falls somewhere in the middle. Probably influenced by its Hewlett-Packard liaison, the new low-end LBP-5000 has 2,500 and 2,000-page cartridges, shipping with only 1,000 pages-worth of each colour.

Likewise, Dell falls somewhere in the middle, offering healthy yields at the upper end but tending towards the miserly with 2,000-page yields at the low end.

Cost of Printing

Sadly these high capacity cartridges do not always show through in the Total Cost of Printing figures, by reducing costs, as much as we might like to see.

Konica Minolta’s Total Cost of Printing places the models comfortably in the middle of the group while Dell offers best value and Lexmark, predictably, does not!

~End~

This entry was posted on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 12:02 am and is filed under Hardware, New Products, Pricing, Comparisons, Total Cost of Printing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.