The Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W succeeds the company's PagePro 1250W, formerly a PC World Best Buy. The 1250W rose to the top of our chart, in part, because of its low price. But laser printer prices have dropped across the board. Despite its modest $150 price tag, the 1350W isn't the bargain that its predecessor was; and it turned in mediocre print speeds and image quality.

Like other printers that depend on Windows for processing, the 1350W relies on the associated PC's CPU to render pages directly from Windows' low-level Graphics Device Interface. With today's powerful processors, that's a reasonable way to economize on the printer's own processor. But it also means that this printer is compatible with Windows machines only, and that it lacks PostScript and PCL support--shortcomings that shouldn't affect your ability to print everyday documents.

At its default resolution of 1200 by 600 dots per inch, the 1350W generated text pages at 13.9 pages per minute and graphics pages at 7.3 ppm. Both figures are below the average marks for our recently tested group of small-office printers. The 1350W did a fair job of printing text; in particular, it kept small characters sharp. When we bumped up the resolution to 1200 by 1200 for our JPEG image test, however, the image looked too dark and showed a distinct grid.

If you're short of desk space and don't need your printer to be constantly ready to go, you can stash a stack of paper in your desk drawer, and flip up the paper tray to stow it away. In this space-saving mode, the 1350W has a remarkably small footprint that could fit nicely in a cramped home office. In a small-office environment, however, the printer's 150-page paper capacity may be too small, and no additional paper tray is offered. The 1350W also lacks a dedicated slot for alternative media--so if you're printing envelopes or labels, they'll have to share the one available paper tray.

This Windows-only model economizes by being driven by your PC. As prices of fuller-featured printers tumble, though, you can find better quality and performance for the money elsewhere.

Paul Jasper