Konica Minolta Earns BLI’s Pick for 2012 A3 MFP "Line of the Year"

For the second consecutive year, Konica Minolta Business Solutions has won Buyers Laboratory LLC’s (BLI’s) most coveted award—A3 MFP Line of the Year. Once each year, Buyers Lab, the leading global provider of information and testing services to the digital imaging industry, acknowledges the vendors whose product lines are determined to be the best overall in their respective categories based on the cumulative results of models tested in BLI’s rigorous two-month laboratory evaluation. By assessing reliability, image quality, ease of use, productivity and a range of other criteria, the tests reveal the products that deliver customers the best value and most trouble-free performance. Also considered are the breadth of the vendor’s line and the vendor’s ability to provide quality products suitable to a broad spectrum of customer needs, from low-volume to high-volume.

“The Konica Minolta line continues to impress, currently including 14 A3 “Pick” winners—more than any other MFP vendor,” said George Mikolay, senior product editor, A3/Copier MFPs. “It’s a remarkable achievement that among all 14 ‘Pick’ winners, not a single malfunction occurred,” said BLI Managing Editor Daria Hoffman, pointing out that the only service required was for routine scheduled preventive maintenance. “When all currently available tested A3 models are considered, Konica Minolta has the best reliability record of all eligible vendors, proving that it offers the quality buyers consider more important than any other.”

Konica Minolta currently has six individual “Picks” for its business colour products, ranging in speed from 22 to 65 ppm. “Colour print quality is also a differentiator for Konica Minolta, said Pete Emory, BLI’s manager of laboratory testing. “Unlike the majority of business colour models we test, Konica Minolta’s products maintain very good and consistent output from start to finish over the course of our high-volume tests.” In addition, all of Konica Minolta’s colour “Pick” winners received high marks for both business graphics and photographic images—something that can’t be said of most competitors. Even so, for more graphics-intensive environments, an EFI Fiery controller is also available for all the models from 28 ppm and above.

Equally strong on the monochrome side, Konica Minolta’s line currently has eight monochrome “Pick” winners ranging in speed from 22 ppm to 75 ppm. Common to the majority of these “Pick” winners are fast scan speeds and exceptional paper-handling capabilities, including modular finishing options that allow users to upgrade easily as their needs evolve. Above average performances by most in BLI’s real-world job stream test means there won’t be unproductive wait times in environments in which multiple users send jobs to the device at once during busy times of the day.

A leader among document imaging companies in offering security features such as hard drive overwrite as standard rather than optional, Konica Minolta provides a comprehensive offering of standard security measures for its A3 products, as well as a biometric access control option that recognises vein patterns in users’ fingertips to enable quick, hassle-free authentication. And the company’s excellent print drivers feature the award-winning My Tab, which allows the first tab of Konica Minolta’s print drivers to be customized for each user. “Comparably equipped, most of the models BLI tested also offer suggested retail prices that are competitive to lower than average for their respective groups and typically offer strong features sets to boot, making them exceptional values for buyers,” said Mikolay.

Konica Minolta’s A3 business colour winners include the bizhub C220; bizhub C280; bizhub C360; bizhub C452; bizhub C552/C552DS; and bizhub C652/C652DS. Konica Minolta’s current A3 monochrome winners include the bizhub 652; bizhub 552; bizhub 423; bizhub 363; bizhub 283; bizhub 223; bizhub 601; and bizhub 751.

“We are honoured to have received BLI’s highly coveted ‘MFP Line of the Year’ award," said Stevan Caldwell, National Marketing Manager, Konica Minolta Business Solutions Australia. “This recognition from BLI is testimony to Konica Minolta’s ongoing innovation and market-leading technologies which provides exceptional colour print quality and reliability across our entire MFP product range.”