General office version broadens market for award winning Konica 8050

Konica Minolta Business Solutions (UK) Ltd has introduced a new general office version of the award winning Konica 8050 colour imaging system. While more economically priced than the original print production version, the new 8050 system still offers a high specification that will meet the needs of the majority of customer applications.

The 8050 colour system breaks new ground in the colour system market because it offers the same 50 print per minute speed for both colour and black and white output. This means customers need no longer compromise on system performance when selecting a colour system.

The 8050 is ideal for all areas of the business that require fast high quality colour output as well as black and white. For central reprographic departments, marketing departments and so on this means only one system is now required for both colour and mono printing, saving on the cost and space of a dedicated colour system.

Technically the most significant change to the new 8050 is the use of a an new embedded print controller as a lower cost alternative to the high specification IP-921 external print controller originally developed by EFI for use with the Konica 8050. While more economically priced, the new embedded print controller still offers outstanding levels of performance to meet the needs of a general office environment.

With a 256Mb memory as standard the CN5001e embedded print controller offers many high-productivity features such as scan once, print many and job reservation for pre-programming. The controller will interface to 10/100baseT networks and also has a parallel port for peer to peer connection. For network printing the CN5001e print controller is PCL6 and PostScript 3 compatible. A 40Gbyte hard drive is also supplied with the CN5001e controller for Internet Printing Protocol document server applications.

The 8050 general office version with an embedded print controller will further increase demand for the best selling Konica 8050, which achieved the only Best Buy award in the 2004 annual What To Buy For Business report on colour copiers.

Commenting on the launch of the 8050 general office version John Howard, Head of Marketing for Konica Minolta said, This new, more economically priced configuration for the Konica 8050 will broaden the appeal of the system. It will allow our customers to select one document imaging system to meet all their print and copying needs, including black and white and colour copying at the same speed. Based on the existing high demand for the Konica 8050 we anticipate a significant increase in sales.