Konica Minolta Magicolor 4695MF review

Colour laser multifunction printers for workgroups are a convenient and often cost-effective option, as they serve as scanner, copier and fax machine, as well as a networked printer. Konica Minolta's Magicolor 4695MF is a substantial machine designed for relatively high duty cycles and includes both PCL and PostScript Level 3 emulations.

If you're installing the machine you'll know just how substantial, as it weighs 55kg, so is a definite two-person lift. It's not clear why it has to be quite so heavy or have such a large footprint there are A3 machines that take up less desk space. Once set up, though, its conventional lines mean it won't be a stranger to anybody who has used a photocopier before.

The control panel is straightforward, with a 4-line by 16-character backlit LCD display, bracketed on the right by a four-way menu navigation ring and on the left by fax function buttons. To the right of the navigation ring is a number pad for fax dialling and to the right of that are mode buttons for fax, scan and copy, as well as colour and black-and-white start buttons and one for cancelling a job.

At the top of the machine is a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and a very large, counter-balanced cover for the A4 flatbed scanner. There's a 250-sheet tray at the base of the front panel, where you load paper in landscape mode, like a copier, and there's a 100-sheet, multi-purpose tray that folds down from the right-hand side for occasional print on special media. The output tray hangs like a balcony from the left-hand side of the machine, further increasing its footprint.

Although a 500-sheet secondary tray is available as an option, it seems odd not to provide a higher capacity tray as standard, on a machine with a 120,000-page duty cycle. In a busy office, you could be refilling it rather too regularly.

Because of its basis as a copier, the Magicolor 4695MF can perform some neat tricks. As well as fairly normal enlargement and reduction copying, the machine can produce a duplex copy from two scanned pages, enlarge a page up to four pages and repeat a small, scanned image multiple times on a single page.