On a personal note, I had to buy a colour photocopier for my business around a decade ago. It cost £10,000, was expensive to run and gave distinctly average results. The new magicolor 2480 MF is a testament to how far the technology has come since then. Based on Konica Minolta’s acclaimed colour laser printers, it adds a raft of extras, including scanning and direct standalone mono or colour photocopying, complete with a built-in 50-sheet ADF (Automatic Document Feeder). It can handle fax transmission and receipt, although it has to communicate via a PC in this respect rather than having its own phone line socket.

At the core of the machine, the colour laser printer has an impressive maximum resolution of 2,400x6,00dpi. For a laser, colour quality proved especially rich and vibrant in our tests, with excellent sharpness for font edges and photo reproduction even in standard 600dpi mode. Results were always impressive on plain paper, and wonderful on glossy laser-compatible photo paper or white card, up to a maximum thickness of 160gsm.

Performance is equally appealing in terms of speed, with the printer averaging 20 pages per minute in mono and five pages per minute in full colour, both for printing and copying. We found that ‘first page’ prints took just over 10 seconds for mono and 20 seconds for colour, while a single page A4 colour photocopy of a glossy photo took just 50 seconds exactly.

The colour scanning quality is often the weakest link in MFDs (Multi-Function Devices) but scans from the CCD-based flatbed proved pin-sharp, with highly accurate colour rendition. For scanning or photocopying, what the scanner sees really is what you get as a final result.

Toner costs, using ‘high yield’ (4,500 page) colour cartridges and the standard mono cartridge, work out to a respectable 1.3p per mono page and 6.7p for colour. If you need to replace all the cartridges as well as the imaging drum after an expected 45,000 mono prints (only 11,000 for colour), the bill would come to around £470, which is well on the way to the price of a whole new printer. Even so, the 2480 MF is a joy to use and our lengthy tests produced great quality prints with excellent reliability and consistency.