Konica Minolta should know a bit about office equipment, with its background in both printing and copying. The PagePro 4650EN is a mono laser printer designed to service an office or workgroup. It has a couple of built-in extras which make it especially suited to the business environment, though also a couple of surprising omissions in its feature set.

It's a substantial machine, but no bigger than models from its main rivals. Some of its height is due to twin paper trays, built in as standard. The lower of these two can take a full 500-sheet ream of paper, while the upper one, intended for special media, can take a further 150 sheets.

A large, four line, backlit LCD panel at the front shows status and menu information, though the all-capitals font looks rather amateurish. There's a USB socket under a small slide cover next to the controls and this will take a USB drive or a cable from a PictBridge camera.

Unfortunately this isn't available on the default machine, as you need to add a 1GB CompactFlash card or an internal hard drive for it to work. Memory cards are so cheap now that it's surprising Konica Minolta hasn't fitted one as standard. Still, it's one way for a dealer to add value and worth haggling over.

At the back are sockets for USB 2, parallel and Ethernet networking, up to the Gigabit level. This makes the machine very versatile, even if you're connecting it into a legacy parallel print server.

The PagePro 4650EN is rated at ‘up to 34ppm', which would be a fair turn of speed if we could get anything like this out of the machine. In fact, our five-page text print took just under 20 seconds, with five pages of text and graphics coming in a few seconds faster.

This gives a maximum, real-world print speed in normal print mode of under 18ppm. This is still a fair turn of speed, but it's hard to see where the quoted numbers come from (as is usually the case in this sector of the industry).

Print quality is generally good, with crisp text and business graphics in the default 600dpi print mode. This can be switched to a top resolution of 1,200dpi for photographic reproduction, which is also fair, though there's slight striping across the image.

The only consumable is an integrated drum and toner cartridge, available in 10,000 and 18,000 page capacities. Using the higher yield cartridge gives a cost per page of just under 1.8p including paper. Given that maintenance costs will be low, this running cost is good in comparison with its main rivals.

The PagePro 4650EN is a robust and serviceable office laser printer, with flexible paper handling and a low total cost of ownership. There are a couple of features missing, most notably a duplex facility and the necessary memory for direct printing, but otherwise this is a sound office workhorse.