Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF colour laser multifunction

Konica Minolta's diminutive colour laser multifunction is ideal for small businesses

PC World Australia (online)

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Konica Minolta’s Magicolor 1690MF is a small and affordable colour laser multifunction that’s easy to share over a network. Its print speeds and quality won’t amaze, but it will certainly suffice if your small business needs to conduct basic black and white printing and produce the odd colour graphic.

Pros

  • Small, extensive networking protocols, inexpensive consumables

Cons

  • Unable to print from USB drives, slow colour printing, minimal network security options

Bottom Line

Low consumable costs and extensive support for different network protocols make the Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF colour laser multifunction a suitable choice for small businesses. If you can handle slow colour printing and potentially messy toner replacement, this multifunction printer has plenty to offer.

Would you buy this?

  • Where to buy

    Priced from: $ 337.59
    Selling at 3 stores
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Special Offers

The Magicolor 1690MF colour laser multifunction can connect over USB and Ethernet, and it also offers a 33.6Kbps Super G3 fax with 6MB of in-built memory. A second USB port on the front of the multifunction allows you to scan to flash drives, though you won’t be able to print documents from them.

Paper handling maxes out at 200 A4 sheets through a front paper cassette; an optional 500 sheet lower feeder unit can be purchased for an extra $155. An optional automatic duplexer costs $269 or $155 if purchased with the lower feeder unit.

Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF Toner

Toner replacement can be time consuming and messy.

For a colour laser multifunction, the Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF is certainly small. That’s because the four toners are combined into a rotating carousel rather than in a straight line as usual. They are replaceable through a front panel. Only one is accessible at a time, which makes toner replacement slightly more time consuming than with a standard colour laser. However, you won’t have to replace all four toners simultaneously anyway. Our main concern is with the toner powder, which easily gets on both the printer and hands; the user manual even warns against spilling toner powder into the printer.

The four toners are quite small and only capable of printing 2500 pages each. Thankfully, both toner and drum prices are low, with the Magicolor 1690MF averaging a running cost of 8.4c per A4 page.

Apart from a convoluted menu system, the Magicolor 1690MF’s control panel is easy to use. You can control extensive scan, copy, fax and network settings directly from the panel, which has a monochrome display, as well as individual network protocols. The Web-based interface makes it a little easier to change these settings, though it doesn't provide any significant security settings beyond an administration password.

Print Speed Results
Model Price B&W
(ppm)		 Colour
(ppm)
Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF $799 20.4 5
Brother HL-3070CW $579 17 17
Dell 2135cn $699 16 12
Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C1190FS $799 16.5 12.2
Fuji Xerox DocuPrint C2120 $878.90 20 18.2
HP Colour LaserJet CM1312nfi $899 12.2 8.3
Samsung CLX-6210FX $1199 20 20

Monochrome print speeds are reasonable, though the toner carousel system significantly slows colour printing. Text quality is quite good, though achieving the best results when printing colour graphics may require experimentation. Colours in our test document were vibrant when using default settings, but blues were highly inaccurate. The print driver allows you to change colour matching settings for individual images, graphics and text.

The Konica Minolta Magicolor 1690MF has a maximum scanning resolution of 600x300dpi, though you’ll only be able to choose a maximum of 300x300dpi when scanning directly from the control panel or through the automatic document feeder. Quality is acceptable, though it is more suited to scanning text documents than photos.

As long as you can put up with potentially messy and time consuming consumable replacement, the Konica Minolta 1690MF colour laser multifunction is a good choice for small and home offices.

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