KONICA MINOLTA Wins “Pick of the Year” Award

December 6, 2005 - Mobile, AL – KONICA MINOLTA PRINTING SOLUTIONS U.S.A., INC. announced today that its magicolor 5450 has received Buyers Laboratory’s Fall 2005 “Pick of the Year” award for “Outstanding Mid-Size Workgroup Color Printer.” This falls on the heels of a double win this past spring when the magicolor 2400W and magicolor 2430 DL earned “Pick of the Year” accolades in the Personal Color Laser Printer and Small Workgroup Multi-Pass Color Laser Printer categories, respectively. Earlier KONICA MINOLTA winners of this prestigious award include the magicolor 2350, magicolor 7300, PagePro 1250W, and PagePro 9100.

Buyers Laboratory is the leading independent office products test lab and business consumer advocate. Its “Pick” awards are given to those “products that gave an exceptional performance throughout our comprehensive lab tests and clearly stood out among the rest,” according to Anthony Polifrone, managing director of Buyers Laboratory. “To acknowledge those exemplary performers, BLI honors them with its ‘Pick’ awards. To be chosen as such tells business consumers and the industry that these products have clearly proven to be among the very best of their product categories when subjected to BLI’s exhaustive in-house testing, and confirms that these products can be counted on for superior performance.”

Outstanding Mid-Size Workgroup Color Printer
The KONICA MINOLTA magicolor 5450 is a high-performance workgroup color laser that features a desktop friendly design. Buyers Laboratory technicians were especially impressed with the magicolor 5450’s “excellent” reliability and ease of use. According to the test report, the printer demonstrated “flawless reliability,” completing the two-month, 30,000-impression durability test “without experiencing a single malfunction or misfeed.”

“The magicolor 5450 is a great choice for medium workgroups,” stated Paul DePaolo, senior test engineer at Buyers Laboratory. “Not only is the magicolor 5450 one of the lowest-priced legal-size color printers in this speed range, but its procedure for replacing toner is one of the cleanest and simplest we’ve seen.”

Buyers Laboratory also remarked on the quality of both color and black output, especially noting the “vibrant and eye-catching colors in graphs and charts,” the “realistic-looking colors in most images,” and the “crisp and cleanly formed [text] characters, even at 6-point font sizes.” Technicians found that the overall color and monochrome print efficiency rates ranged to “well above average” when compared to other models tested in this class, and declared that “when printing from the PCL driver, the first-print time for the Word file used in testing is the fastest of single-pass printers tested.”

“It is an honor to receive Buyers Laboratory’s Fall 2005 “Pick of the Year” award for the magicolor 5450,” commented Steve Fletcher, president and COO of KONICA MINOLTA PRINTING SOLUTIONS U.S.A., INC. “We strive to bring the highest-quality, best-performing printers to market, and this prestigious award confirms that this goal was met. We are excited to offer customers products that excel even when subjected to rigorous evaluation.”

The magicolor 5450 has a one-year exchange warranty and ships with a pre-installed set of supplies, including cyan, magenta, yellow, and black all-in-one imaging cartridges. The printer is available through KONICA MINOLTA’s network of e-commerce partners, dealers, and authorized distributors. To find the location nearest you, call 800-523-2696 or visit www.buymagicolor.com.