Minolta makes a great color laser printer
Written: Aug 28 '03 (Updated Dec 27 '04)
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Pros: Excellent printing for photos, graphics and all sized text.
Cons: Small manual; useful information only on CD. Average noise.
The Bottom Line: Put an old printer noise box around this machine and enjoy it.
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| roostrfsh's Full Review: Konica Minolta magicolor 2350 Laser Printer |
I didn’t know color laser printers could do so well with photographs, graphics and text until I bought the Minolta/QMS 2350 EN Magicolor color laser printer.
I needed excellent printer resolution for a side business that I do. This required legible, distinguishable, type down to a very small three point type. I need accurate color printing for graphics. I need a printer to feed at the most 40-lb., 8.5 x 11-inch paper stock. Speed and photographs were of secondary importance but the photographic images coming out of this printer is exceptional. The printer speed of the Minolta is an average at 17 ppm/black and 4 ppm/color the exceptional photos are worth the wait time.
Setting up the printer was easy. I simply followed the easy to understand instructions in the manual. Setup time was about 40 minutes which includes unpacking time to first print. The four toner boxes are preinstalled, the necessary fuser oil box is not there because of the nice design the printer has of the oil built into the toners. The only, simple, internal installation was the waste toner box. The software installation in my Win XP computer, the printer drivers, was another easy installation from a CD, or optionally (recommended), Minolta/QMS web site. The printer will also work with Win95/98/Me/NT 4.0/Macintosh OS X/OS X classic/Linux and UNIX. I connected the printer to a USB 1.1 port. Ethernet (10/100BaseTX) and IEEE 1284 parallel ports are also available.
The first photo I printed out on standard 94 brightness, 24 lb. bond laser paper from Office Max with all the printer's controls set to standard (600 x 600 dpi) was gorgeous! The photo had ‘snap’ to it; but there was no over bright, blown out areas. I believe the software in the printer software has some kind of compensation for bright areas. The shadow areas retained detail. The midtones of the print did not print muddy and retained details. What really impressed me were the creamy smooth tonal gradations in the photo. There were no abrupt midtone changes like other color laser printers have. Instead the Minolta printer had a nice even change in the print tones. I believe this is the result of one single reason. The standard printing resolution of 600 x 600 dpi contone printing (and this printer can do up to 1200 x 1200 dpi) gives the printer a lot of leeway for printing accurate midtones.
This Minolta laser printer is the newest generation of color laser printers with the ability to make Contone prints. Contone printers dither, or stagger, their dot registration slightly off the top of each other to make a more blended, simply, more color. Because of this ability the Minolta printer can make 4,096 different colors per dot (!) rather than a standard color laser printer’s 256 colors per dot. The end result of the additional dot colors shows up as a very blended color print. It works! I could hang my first photo on the wall and no one would know it was a laser print.
I did add more, easy to install, memory from its standard 128 MB to 256 MB just because it is always nice to have more memory. The printer will accept up to 384 MB of memory. The memory chip is just standard computer memory so I just dug into my computer junk box and used a leftover 128 MB PC100 memory. It was installed in about 10 minutes.
I have two older (1996) color lasers, the HP ColorJet 5 and this Minolta printer simply outclasses them every time. The HPs would only take 20 to 24 lb. bond paper at only 8.5 x 11-inches while the Minolta takes many different sized/weight paper/transparency stock and envelopes. The Minolta paper size range goes up to 8.5 x 14-inches and up to 90-lb paper weight. The photos on the HPs were always just passable. The Minolta printer beautiful photo output make the HPs photos look even worse.
Am I saying the Minolta printer is perfect? No, it does have its problems. The installation manual is an impressive size until you see the book is in four different languages. Do you want more information on the printer? Luckily the printer is installed because all the information is on a CD that needs to be printed out or alternately viewed on the computer monitor through the supplied Acrobat Reader.
The printer is just average printer noisy with most of the noise coming from the toner rotating mechanism. The noise it not enough to wake up the dead (like my HP ColorJets were) but it is loud enough to annoy the sleeping family.
The one line LCD display on the top front of the printer is cryptic to understand and its menu system slows me down trying to figure out what each menu does. The information LCD screen is on a gray background with gray type making the readout hard to read. The jog dial/center select button is non-intuitive so I prefer to use computer commands to adjust settings.
The competition printer I seriously considered buying was the current HP 1500 series ColorJet. The HP printer can also print a heavier paper stock; I saw it print a 60-lb sheet. The HPs photo output was good until I compared the HP sample to the Minolta image. The Minolta picture was one level better.
Is the Minolta photo as good as a good inkjet printer? The Minolta image is very good, very close but not quite as good as my HP 970Cxi inkjet. The Minolta image is a quarter of a notch worse. But to me the Minolta image is very acceptable. I’m an old graphic artist/printer/photographer and I’m very picky about my images. I’d easily accept the Minolta photos.
I would not hesitate to recommend the Minolta printer. I think I’ll move out the two 108-lb. monster-sized HP ColorJet printers and replace them with this new half-sized, “lightweight” 59-lb. Minolta printer.
I’m keeping the Minolta 2350 EN printer!
Other options on the printer include HARD DISK, NETWORKING CAPABILITIES, AUTOMATIC DUPLEXING and a BUILT IN SCANNER.
INFORMATION: uses a Power PC @ 200 MHz
PostScript, PDL 6, PDF, Pantone matching system, Automatic Image Calibration
200 sheets, optional 500 sheet tray
Manual duplex, automatic optional
137 resident fonts, 76 PCL fonts and 40 HPGL fonts
1 year warranty
UPDATE 12/27/04. Yup, I've had the printer for almost a year and a half and it is still my work horse printer. The print quality is still first-class and printer has needed zero mechanical maintenance.
The printer gets the normal use you would expect a home printer to get. The starter black toner cartridge has been replaced with a high capacity one and that was easy to do. The cyan cartridge reads low on the LCD panel with a high capacity cartridge ready to put in the printer.
The quality of the print is still perfect. I expect the Magicolor printer to be running in my next update a year and half from now.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 836
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
roostrfsh
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Location: Stockton, CA, USA
Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
STILL living in and loving California.
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