5430DL Specifications

magicolor Konica Minolta 5430DL Technical Specifications
Print Method	Electrophotographic laser
Print Speed (Simplex)	Colour/Monochrome: up to 20ppm (A4), up to 21 ppm (letter) Duplex: Up to 12.8 ppm A4, First page out: 14 seconds.
Colour	Automatic Image Calibration
Resolution	2400 x 600 dpi, 1200 x 600 dpi, 600 x 600 dpi
Maximum Duty Cycle	60,000 pages/month
Processor Type	ARM9 926EJ-S, 200MHz
Memory	64 MB RAM Upgradeable to 576 MB RAM
Operating System	Windows: 98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/Server 2003 Macintosh: OS 9.04 or later, OS X 9.22 or later Linux: RedHat 8.0 or later, SuSe 8.1 or later
Emulations	PageScope ruster language
Standard Paper Input	250 sheet Lower Feeder Unit
Standard Paper Output	Up to 1250 sheets (3 sources)
Paper Sizes Supported	Tray 2 & 3 (500 sheets): A4, Executive, B5 JIS, Letter, Folio, Legal, Foolscap, Government Legal, Letter Plus, Government Letter; Tray 1 (250 sheet): A4, Executive, B5 JIS, Letter, Government Letter, A5, Statement, UK Quarto, Japanese PostCard, Double Postcard, Envelopes #10, Chou #3, Chou #4, DL, Monarch, C5, C6, Kai 16, Kai 32, 16K, You #4
Print Media	Plain Paper (60-90 g/m2), Thick Stock 1 (91-150 g/m2), Thick Stock 2 (151-210 g/m2), Laser Transparency, Laser Labels (60-163 g/m2), Envelopes (91-163g/m2), Postcard (60-163g/m2)
Duplex Printing	Optional
Dimensions (WxDxH) And Weight	520 mm x 420 mm x 420 mm, Less than 30 kg; w/consumables 35 kg
Power Requirements	220/240V Model: 220/240 VAC ±10%, 50/60 ±3% Hz
Power Consumption - Operating	Max <1250W; Standby <170W; Energy Save <43W; Energy Star Compliant
Temperature Requirements	Operating: 10° to 35°C
Humidity	Operating: 15% to 85%
Noise Level	Printing <54dBA; Standby <39dBA
Regulatory/Safety Conformity	UL, cUL, FCC-B, DOC, VCCI, CE Marking, C-Tick, CDRH
Consumables	Printer ships with installed start-up capacity set of each Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black toner (yield up to 3,000 pages) and waste toner bottle (yield up to 32,000 pages). Consumable Capacity: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (yield up to 6,000 pages) and waste toner bottle (yield up to 32,000 pages).
Warranty Details	1 year on-site. (not available in all areas)
Warranty Extensions?	An optional increase of one or two years warranty, (total two or three years) is available.

Konica Minolta 5440DL Specifications

Magicolor Konica Minolta 5440DL Technical Specifications
Print Method	Electrophotographic laser
Print Speed (Simplex)	Colour/Monochrome: up to 25ppm (A4), up to 27 ppm (letter) Duplex: Up to 12.8 ppm A4, First page out: 14 seconds.
Colour	Automatic Image Calibration
Resolution	2400 x 600 dpi, 1200 x 600 dpi, 600 x 600 dpi
Maximum Duty Cycle	60,000 pages/month
Processor Type	ARM9 926EJ-S, 200MHz
Memory	64 MB RAM Upgradeable to 512 MB RAM
Operating System	Windows 98/Me/NT4/2000/XP/Server 2003; Mac OS 9.04 or later, OSX 9.22 or later; Linux RedHat 8.0 or later, SuSe 8.1 or later
Emulations	PageScope ruster language
Standard Paper Input	500 sheet Lower Feeder Unit
Standard Paper Output	250 sheet face-down output tray
Paper Sizes Supported	Tray 2 & 3 (500 sheets): A4, Executive, B5 JIS, Letter, Folio, Legal, Foolscap, Government Legal, Letter Plus, Government Letter; Tray 1 (250 sheet): A4, Executive, B5 JIS, Letter, Government Letter, A5, Statement, UK Quarto, Japanese PostCard, Double Postcard, Envelopes #10, Chou #3, Chou #4, DL, Monarch, C5, C6, Kai 16, Kai 32, 16K, You #4
Print Media	Plain Paper (60-90 g/m2), Thick Stock 1 (91-150 g/m2), Thick Stock 2 (151-210 g/m2), Laser Transparency, Laser Labels (60-163 g/m2), Envelopes (91-163g/m2), Postcard (60-163g/m2)
Duplex Printing	Optional
Dimensions (WxDxH) And Weight	520 mm x 420 mm x 420 mm, Less than 31 kg; w/consumables 37 kg
Power Requirements	220/240V Model: 220/240 VAC ±10%, 50/60 ±3% Hz
Power Consumption - Operating	Max <1250W; Standby <170W; Energy Save <43W; Energy Star Compliant
Temperature Requirements	Operating: 10° to 35°C
Humidity	Operating: 15% to 85%
Noise Level	Printing <54dBA; Standby <39dBA
Regulatory/Safety Conformity	UL, cUL, FCC-B, DOC, VCCI, CE Marking, C-Tick, CDRH
Consumables	Printer ships with installed start-up capacity set of each Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black toner (yield up to 3,000 pages) and waste toner bottle (yield up to 6,000 pages). Consumable Capacity: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (yield up to 6,000 pages or 12,000 pages) and waste toner bottle (yield up to 32,000 pages).
Warranty Details	1 year on-site. (not available in all areas)
Warranty Extensions?	An optional increase of one or two years warranty, (total two or three years) is available.

News Items

Konica Minolta 5430 Wins MacUser Printer Of The Year 2003 Award

An A4 colour laser priced alongside entry-level models, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430 is no bargain basement printer. Its crisp, high-contrast output will please business users while design studios and production desks will appreciate its hairline precision and advanced colour handling, complete with on-press proofing emulation.

Below is the MacUser Review from March 2003

VERDICT: You would think that such a cheap colour laser would be limited in terms of functionality, but the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430 will be more than up to the task in even medium-sized offices

A quick scan through the reviews on the MacUser Web site would indicate that if you're after a PostScript colour laser printer, you'd be looking at a minimum outlay of around £1,600. So when Konica Minolta told us it had a PostScript colour laser product for less than £850, we were keen to put it through its paces. the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430

When the Magicolor 5430 arrived, any doubts we had were laid to rest. Not only is it the cheapest PostScript colour laser printer we've seen, it's also the most compact, at just 35.6 x 50 x 39.2cm - very roughly the size of two Power Macs side by side. Konica Minolta is targeting this product as a replacement for existing office mono lasers: it costs about the same as an equivalently specified mono product, but throws full-colour printing into the bargain. This will certainly prove an attractive pull, particularly to those in smaller offices, as the 5430 takes up so little desk space - regardless of the colour issue.

Getting the printer up and running on an AppleTalk network couldn't be easier. Just plug it into your network, select AppleTalk in Print Centre, and the printer will appear in the list. If you're running a TCP/IP network, you can use the simple interface on the printer itself to allocate an IP address or set it to use DHCP.

Dash of colour

It's just as well that the printer is so easy to set up , because additional Mac support is rather scant. The installer CD provides the necessary PPD and installs it in the appropriate location, but there are none of the utilities such as Status Monitor, Crown Print Monitor and set of Pantone colour matching tables that exist for Windows users. There's also an upgrade for the software on the printer itself included on the disc, but installing this is fiddly - you have to find the file and manually drop it on to your print queue. However, there are clear instructions for Mac users in the manual and on the CD, so we needn't feel like an afterthought as we do in documentation for so many other laser printers.

A handy feature of the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430 is that you don't have to have a network to use it - if you're a single user, it works just as well if you connect it to your Mac's USB port. OS X's Print Center handles setting up a USB printer in almost the same way as an AppleTalk one, and it uses the same PPD file.

For office environments, colour lasers have numerous advantages over inkjets. First is the print speed. The the Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430 may not print as fast as some workhorse colour lasers, but it's a fraction of the size and a fraction of the cost. It performs impressively nonetheless. We got it to output an impressive 16 pages of black-only text in a minute, just one page less than the manufacturer's quoted speed. Konica Minolta doesn't expect that people will want to print in full colour all the time, but instead that users will want occasionally to add colour to documents. This is just as well, as print speed for colour output drops to 4ppm (as each page has to pass by all four colour toner/fuser units). But even so this is much faster than most inkjets.

The second advantage over inkjets is consumables: laser toner cartridges last significantly longer than ink cartridges. Each of the 5430's four-colour cartridges lasts for approximately 4,500 pages at 5% cover. Bear in mind, though, that upkeep and maintenance is more of a chore for a laser, since there are items other than toner cartridges that need to be replaced at regular intervals, such as the waste toner bottle and the OPC drum cartridge. However, the 5430 uses a new toner technology that has wax in the toner, which eliminates the need for the often messy fuser oil used by most colour lasers.

The third principal difference between lasers and inkjets is the crucial issue of output quality. The Konica Minolta Magicolor 5430, like other PostScripts, will print PostScript output without the need for additional RIP software. Text output from the Magicolor 5430 is simply faultless. Edges are crisp, contrast is excellent, and characters are readable down to as little as three points. The Magicolor 5430 also provides excellent results for printing business documents and graphics, with faithful colour reproduction, no noticeable banding, and impressive clarity. What a colour laser won't do is provide photographic quality reproductions of your digital photos, but even so, the photo output from this printer is more than acceptable, thanks to the use of continuous tone printing technology, which enhances photo output with smooth gradations and more natural-looking halftones. We were also unable to trip up the printer's PostScript 3 emulation engine, even with the most complex of PDF files.

Hot competition

For more demanding users, the standard array of optional extras is available, such as an additional 500-sheet input tray and a duplex unit.

Aside from the lack of feature parity between Mac and Windows, we can't think of anything to criticise about the Magicolor 5430. You would think that such a cheap colour laser would be limited in terms of functionality, but this product will be more than up to the task in even medium-sized offices. Konica Minolta must have the competition worried.

Mike Hirschkorn

PROS: Excellent value for money + Excellent print quality + Sufficiently fast output

CONS: Less utility software for the Mac than for Windows