When we reviewed the HP LaserJet 1012 and Lexmark E220 a couple of months ago, we remarked that the price of an entry-level or personal laser printer -- from those vendors, Samsung, Brother, or whoever -- seems to have been stuck at $199 for a while. Cut to scene of Konica Minolta exec cracking a whip over terrified engineers -- "Lower, damn you!" The successor to the popular Minolta-QMS PagePro 1250W costs $180.

To be sure, the Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W has more than a slightly pared price and a new corporate name to offer. The Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP-compatible monochrome laser boasts a rated speed of 21 pages per minute for letter-sized stock (20 ppm for A4 pages), topping the 15- to 18-ppm advertised performance of its rivals. Its maximum duty cycle is a hefty 15,000 pages per month, and its maximum resolution is a suavely sharp 1,200 by 1,200 dpi.

It's easy to find desk space for the compact PagePro, even if it's destined to share your desk with a color inkjet printer -- the 17-pound printer has roughly a 16 by 16-inch footprint with its fold-down paper tray open, shrinking by a few inches with the tray closed.

Both parallel and USB 1.1 interfaces are standard, though there's no cable in the box. On the other hand, Konica Minolta wins points for preinstalling the toner cartridge -- although it promptly loses them with the old low-priced-printer scam of supplying a penny-pinching, short-lived (1,500-page) "starter" cartridge instead of a regular cartridge.

Unnecessary Sharpness

Setup and operation are kindergarten simple, conducted mostly through a software control panel -- there are no front-panel controls except a couple of status LEDs and a job-cancel button. The software utility offers helpful status indicators and a good variety of watermark, N-up or booklet printing, and manual duplexing options, as well as three resolution or quality settings -- 1,200 by 600 dpi (the default), 600 by 600 dpi, or 1,200 by 1,200 dpi.

There's also a toner-saver mode that stretches cartridge life by printing in faint gray instead of black, and a "midnight mode" that slows output while reducing printer noise. On the latter topic, we found the Konica Minolta's whirs and whines relatively loud for a laser, though not too noisy for a conversation nearby; the shush mode was indeed noticeably quieter during the print jobs we tried, although it didn't affect the throat-clearing, service-elevator noise the PagePro made at the beginning of most tasks, and we liked the driver's dialog-box option to automatically shift into "midnight mode" at specified times (say, between 9:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. if your spouse is sleeping in the next room).

Being a laser, the 1350W offers gorgeous business-class text without bothering with maximum resolution -- and, while there's no real performance difference between the first two quality options, 1,200 by 1,200 mode cuts print speed roughly in half, slowing five pages of Microsoft Word text from 32 seconds to 51 and our one-page Word business letter with company logo from 17 seconds to 26.

We were even more dismayed that the printer hung up and the status screen popped up with a buffer overflow message when we tried printing an 8 by 10-inch digital photo in 1,200 by 1,200 mode -- the PagePro's 8MB of onboard memory is not expandable.

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