Rating exceptionally well in the TCO portion of our analysis, the PagePro 1200W scored almost twice the average for purchase price due to its incredibly low retail price. Don't be fooled by the price tag though, this unit features plenty of qualities some other more expensive printers can only dream about.
Backed by a whopping three-year exchange warranty, including the image drum - no other company in our roundup could offer the same sort of complete coverage, the majority of the manufacturers opting for a single year, due to labour repair costs and long term obsolescence.
One of the only printers to offer true 1200dpi printing, this is a feature not even offered by the considerably more expensive big brother 2300W model from Minolta. This is reflected in our test results, and showed through the test prints the unit produced. Deemed to be above average, plain black text is solid, well formed and very easily read, no blurring or washing out of toner was present. Slight banding and darker than expected toner is evident, although the image can still be made out clearly.
Featuring both USB and parallel connectivity options, this model is supportive of Windows only, no Mac or Linux support to be found here natively. Economy is the real seller here, cheap printers usually sting consumers with expensive consumables to offset the loss on the hardware, not so here, not only does the Minolta 1200W perform better and cost significantly less, but it also has the best economy of all the mono laser printers tested, a single $170 toner roll producing up to 6,000 prints at a meagre three cents per page.
Paper capacity is a bit of a concern here, holding 150 sheets and room for 100 in the output tray it's not the greatest volume holder of the models we tested, but for the cost, we're still impressed. A 500 sheet expansion cassette is available as an additional part.
Speed was another downer on this model, although given it only contains 8MB of integrated print memory, isn't expandable and that all processing is done by the PC, speeds are reasonable and comparable to the more expensive Epson EPL-6100. This is definitely one to check out for low volume budget printers.