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Konica Minolta MAGICOLOR 3100 DN

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Konica Minolta MAGICOLOR 3100 DN Review

by Dan Littman

The Magicolor 3100 DN delivers lots of features at a low price.

WHAT'S HOT: The Magicolor 3100 DN--Minolta's single-pass color laser, which lays down color by passing a sheet of paper through the printer once, rather than four times--sells at the exceptional price of only $1999, loaded with 256MB of memory and an internal duplexer. We also like its clean, even text quality; and its graphics, though not quite as sharp as the very similar Brother HL-4000CN, show nice shading and color. The driver lets you set up header and trailer pages to separate documents as they're printed, and you can instruct the printer to send you an e-mail when your document is finished. Minolta provides a complete set of printed manuals for the Magicolor 3100 DN, as well as extensive on-screen documentation.

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WHAT'S NOT: For some reason, Minolta restricts the colors available for watermarks to black, red, green, yellow, and blue. The Magicolor 3100 DN prints text slightly slower than the Brother HL-4000CN; nevertheless, it's probably fast enough (at 10.8 text pages per minute) to support a small workgroup without any need for a separate monochrome laser to serve the network.

WHAT ELSE: With the internal hard drive option installed ($349), you can proof a single copy of a document and then, if you're satisfied with it, complete the run without going back to your PC to resend the job. The hard drive can store frequently used templates and backgrounds on the printer. Minolta also sells a 1000-sheet, two-tray add-on for $899.

UPSHOT: This is a viable choice for an office on a budget as long as good-enough color is indeed good enough.

SUMMARY

Minolta Magicolor 3100 DN

Rated 16-ppm monochrome/16-ppm color laser, 256MB RAM standard, 1200-by-1200-dpi maximum resolution, 600 sheets input, 250 output.

$2199
800/523-2696
www.minolta-qms.com

User Reviews for Konica Minolta MAGICOLOR 3100 DN

Reviewed by: dwcuffel

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Superb color quality and image sharpness, easy to network, low-cost toner, ready to use out of the box. Built-in duplexing, high-speed output and excellent paper handling.

Weaknesses: None identified yet.

Overall Evaluation: I shopped and studied color lasers for several months before deciding. Initially swayed to HP, I wasn't pleased with the 600 dpi print quality. The Minolta has true 1200 dpi quality and extremely accurate color reproduction. The software utilities have simple tools for beginners, and sophisticated tools for the professionals. The printer took less than 30 minutes to un-crate, set-up and get on-line on my home network. Outstanding performance! I highly recommend this printer to anyone needing high capacity and high quality color laser printing.
Reviewed by: grab2000

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: price, auto-duplexing, excellent print quality

Weaknesses: driver, documentation complexity

Overall Evaluation: I am very pleased with this printer. The price beats comparable high speed color laser printers, but it is also the only one in the price range to offer automatic duplexing. I tested the color printing against original photographs and was quite surprised with the near perfect quality. This printer has many options and features (networking, special color matching technologies, etc.), most of which I will never use. There is a lot of documentation supplied with the printer, essentially made up of many different manuals written for different purposes (administrators manual, network set-up, users manual, and a couple "Crown Books"). Most of the basics are in an installation guide, but if you need more information, it can be confusing trying to determine in which book, and where to look. So far the output is flawless, without a single paper jam or any other problem. A few issues with the Windows 2000 driver were resolved with help from the support desk. Emails and phone calls were answered quickly by Minolta. The support section of Minolta's web-site is very basic and virtually useless, however.

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