OOO Colour! (Minolta QMS magicolor 2300W)

Member Name: maryrobinson

Product:	Minolta QMS magicolor 2300W
Date:	05/02/04 (549 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheep colour printing, Fast

Disadvantages: Banding, Heavy

This is a small, budget colour laser printer. This product arrived in a huge cardboard box with loads of protective polystyrene packaging. The item is very heavy and can only just be moved by one person. Certainly getting its out-of-the-box is a lot harder than you might imagine. I would bear this in mind if you were thinking of purchasing it. Unpacking and setting up is definitely a two-man job.

I used to have an old black and white laser printer, which I used because it was cheap and reliable. Usually the quality of the text is better with laser, and the actual cost of printing is a lot lower. I used a black-and-white laser printer for text, and an Epson stylus inkjet printer for colour. However, as I started using the computer more, the appeal of colour printing grew greater, and I was using it more and more. Inkjet printers, though giving very high quality, are just far too expensive. Therefore, I started looking at budget colour laser printers. This is the smallest printer in a whole range by Minolta QMS. It retails for about 500 pounds, and comes with starter toner cartridges (1500 pages). The replacement toner cartridges cost around 60 pounds for black (4500 pages) and 80 pounds for the three Colours (4500 pages).

I was expecting big things from this printer, although it did not have as high a resolution has the inkjet, nevertheless it does produce excellent quality photo prints. The resolution of the starting image must be high, otherwise the quality is poor, but the Colours print cleanly and crisply and actually look like they do on the screen. This I was quite surprised at, because after owning many inkjet printers, I was constantly disappointed that they printed nothing like what I was expecting. The printer will cope with envelopes, transparencies, and varying thickness is of paper.

Black text prints very very quickly, and looks excellent. Because it is a budget colour laser, when it prints colour pages, it pas
ses the heads over it four times, which means basically, that it takes four times longer to print a colour page, than a black-and-white one. However, the print speed is quite good and you can printer approximately three to four colour images a minute. This is a lot lower than the manufacturers specification, but then it always is.

When printing colour pages with large blocks of colour, the print quality is not as good as it could be, and there is banding over the page. This means for example, that this printer would not be good enough to produce brochures, where large blocks of colour are used. However, when the image is very mixed as in a photograph, the print quality is excellent. I mention this, because apart from small business, the main use I can see for this printer is a small community group or charity using it to print promotional brochures, or leaflets.

There are a loss of new budget colour laser printers coming onto the market, of which I have no experience, however I do know that this particular printer is excellent. It is a very well built machine, and I personally think it looks very good. Although, clearly this is a matter of taste. I worked out that their page cost at about 03p for a full-colour A4 page.

This printer does exactly what I wanted, although it is unsuitable for a low-volume user, it was perfect for me. The initial cost of the printer is very high, and certainly a lot higher than in inkjet. However, if you do plan to print the hundreds of pages per month, in colour the running costs are far far lower. All I would say again, is that it really does struggle with large blocks of colour to the point that the resulting output is unacceptable.

Summary: