Konica Minolta has taken out a Buyer’s Lab (BLI) Line of the Year award for its A3 printers, for a record fourth year in a row.
The Line of the Year picks out a vendor whose products stand out across the board, after a two-month regime of testing in the BLI laboratory. Konica Minolta’s fourth consecutive win is unprecedented for the competition; Daria Hoffman, managing editor of BLI, says, “The fact that year after year Konica Minolta continues to surpass the competition is a testament to the sustained quality of its A3 line.”
One of the devices from the winning line: Konica Minolta’s bizhub C454e
George Mikolay, BLI’s senior product editor for A3/Copier MFPs, says, “What it boils down to with Konica Minolta is consistency. Whereas competing lines may stand out in certain speed bands, or in either colour or black, Konica Minolta’s engines stand out across the board – in reliability, ease of use and image quality – in virtually all speed bands in both colour and black. No other vendor brings the same quality of performance across its product line to the same degree.”
In the lab tests Konica Minolta’s A3 machines logged more than 1.5 million impressions with reliable performance. Mikolay says, “At real-world monthly usage volumes, it would take five Konica Minolta devices before users would experience even a single misfeed a month among them.”
Engineers also praised the line’s print quality and user-replaceable colour drums that mean a service call is not required for swap-overs. An easy-to-use interface, robust scan functionality and bizhub Extended Solution Technology also received high marks.
