SINGAPORE - Konica Minolta was named Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI)'s A3 Multi-Function Peripheral (MFP) Line of the Year for the fourth straight year, the first time in the decades-long history of BLI's awards that a manufacturer has won the award for a fourth consecutive year.

BLI, the leading provider of intelligence on document imaging products and solutions, has been putting products to the test for more than 50 years. Line of the Year, the most coveted honour bestowed by BLI, is awarded once a year to the vendors whose products are determined to be the best in their respective categories of models tested in BLI's rigorous two-month laboratory evaluation.

"We are extremely honoured and excited to receive the prestigious A3 MFP Line of the Year award. The award is testament to Konica Minolta's dedication to innovation. We will continue our relentless pursuit of excellence and are deeply committed to providing even more powerful solutions to our customers in 2014,"said Jonathan Yeo, General Manager, Regional Headquarters for Konica Minolta Business Solutions Asia Pte Ltd.

"What Konica Minolta has achieved with a fourth consecutive Line of the Year win is unprecedented," said BLI Managing Editor Daria Hoffman. "The fact that year after year Konica Minolta continues to surpass the competition is a testament to the sustained quality of its A3 line."

"What it boils down to with Konica Minolta is consistency," said George Mikolay, BLI's senior product editor for A3/Copier MFPs. "Whereas competing lines may stand out in certain speed bands, or in either colour or black, Konica Minolta's engines stand out across the board -- in reliability, ease of use and image quality -- in virtually all speed bands in both colour and black. No other vendor brings the same quality of performance across its product line to the same degree."

Konica Minolta's product line has proven its mettle in terms of reliability -- thequality most important to buyers. Its current A3 products have logged more than 1.5 million impressions in BLI's lab with consistently reliable performance. "In fact," said Mikolay, "at real-world monthly usage volumes, it would take five Konica Minolta devices before users would experience even a single misfeed a month among them."

He added, "The colour engines were found to quickly process and output users' jobs not only in BLI's real-world jobstream test, but also when printing sets and producing booklets, and scan speeds are the fastest or among the fastest in their respective groups. All of Konica Minolta's tested colour devices received high marks for both business graphics and photographic images, producing bright, saturated colour, natural flesh tones and smooth overall output." Konica Minolta's monochrome engines tested this year also earned high marks for printed image quality. "Even in copy mode, text was sharp, fine lines were consistent and halftone levels were distinct across all levels", noted Mikolay.

BLI Manager of Laboratory Testing Pete Emory added, "The reliability Konica Minolta devices have consistently shown, from the low end to the high end, truly separates its line from others we have tested." And the fact that Konica Minolta's devices have user-replaceable colour drums means that, unlike with many competitive devices, a service call is not required to replace them -- a design that maxmises uptime.

Always easy to use, Konica Minolta's excellent user interface, which allows users to easily switch among three different interfaces, has been further enhanced this past year with support for dragging and dropping and pinch-to-zoom, as well as the ability to rotate pages in a scan preview. The control panel also enables users to drag and drop files in a User Box to perform certain functions and rearrange pages in edit mode.

Also contributing to Konica Minolta's A3 MFP Line of the Year accolade is the line's robust scan functionality, which includes the ability to scan documents in PowerPoint format and optional searchable and encrypted PDF.

Further enhancing this outstanding line is bizhub Extended Solution Technology (bEST), which enables integration of Konica Minolta devices with a range of applications that can help to control costs, heighten security and ease burdens associated with document capture, routing and management. Named BLI's2012 MFP Solutions Line of the Year, Konica Minolta now supports the bizhub Market Place -- downloadable apps that allow users to display corporate announcements on their control panel, and to access a library of business forms and templates, check security settings, scan to Microsoft SharePoint and even order recycling boxes and print shipping labels.

Konica Minolta's currently available A3 business colour models include the "Pick"-winning bizhub C364eand bizhub C454e; the Highly Recommended bizhub C224e, bizhub C284e and bizhub C554e; and the bizhub C654e and bizhub C754e. Konica Minolta's currently available A3 monochrome models include the "Pick"-winning bizhub 554e, and the Highly Recommended bizhub 284e and bizhub 364e, as well as the bizhub 654e and bizhub 754e, which are enhanced versions of predecessor models that earned Highly Recommended ratings. Konica Minolta also offers production devices, including the PRO-Award winning bizhub PRESS C7000 and bizhub PRESS 1250/1250P, which further add to the scope and breadth of Konica Minolta's offerings.