Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300 DL

Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300 DeskLaser

Magicolor 2300 DL Review, by Dan Littman February 27, 2003

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• Reviewed by: nitestar95

  Strengths: Pretty prints on plain paper; using a 5 MP camera you can see the blades of grass clearly on a standard 8 1/2 x 11 full page blow up of a picture. No banding or artifacts.

  Weaknesses: The printer tells you toner is empty even though it is not. You will throw away about 25% of the money spent on consumables because the printer won't let you use all the toner that's in the cartridge.

  Overall: Nice prints but as above, they screw you by having the printer cut you off while there is still a lot of toner in the cartridge. After replacing several, I couldn't understand how I was going through so much toner; I opened the cartridge and found it about 25% full. But the cartridge must have some type of chip in it that tells the printer that it's empty, so there's no way to use that cartridge again until minolta 'resets' it somehow. Each cartridge cost me about $80; that means every cartridge I buy I wind up throwing away $20. So far, estimates $120 tossed into the trash because the printer 'thinks' that there's no toner left. I won't buy another printer from these folks.

• Reviewed by: hrbaltd

  Strengths: simple setup, easy to use, excellent black and white and color printing, user friendly, excellent value for the price

  Weaknesses: user screen on printer is hard to read; however, most functions can be accessed off of your computer

  Overall: Our office has never had a laser color printer, had been using a slow ink jet; what a difference! and at this price, we will probably add a couple more of these. Highly recommend.

• Reviewed by: beguna

  Strengths: Cheap, great quality, hardly uses any tonor

  Weaknesses: Warm up takes a while. Noisy. Flourscent lights dim

  Overall: This is a great deal. One of my favorite purchases in the last 5 years. I highly recommend this printer. Software installation can be a bit confusing. I had to run it twice. Great having a network color printer because everyone in the house can share it.

• Reviewed by: pp_projmgr

  Strengths: Low Cost, Network Ready, Workhorse--duty cycle exceeds 30K monthly

  Weaknesses: The annoying user interface is hard to read and the duplexer is more expensive than the machine itself. It is a little power hungry as my lights dim when this guy purrs up.

  Overall: I was searching for a low cost, laser printer to use in my small office and I saw the Magicolor 2300 DL in one of the big office supply stores and I fell in love with it. Of course the $599 price tag made me look elsewhere. My diligence in finding a cheaper price paid off because I found this guy for less than $400 (without a rebate and shipping included!!!). I use it for all my printing. It is a big jump from the inkjets and I can print forever with the consumables (they are still more than 90% after a month of hard use). It is defintely the lowest cost printer you will find with built in networking, color and a high-volume duty cycle. Not really a negative but the color clarity of some the images isn't there because it's not a high-end machine. It's something you will learn to accept.

• Reviewed by: gsimpson

  Strengths: Fast, cheap, colorful printing on plain paper. I bought this printer to replace a Inkjet for printing photos.

  Weaknesses: Heavy, power hungry, not as vivid output as dye-sub or dedicated photo printers.

  Overall: I've ran off over 100 8.5x11" pages of PHOTOGRAPHS and photo album pages off this printer and the worse of the toners (Black) is still 83 percent full. I'm impressed.This is with the toner that came with the printer folks. At this rate I'm expecting 400+ color photo pages from a set of STANDARD toner cartridges.To sweeten the deal, the printer came with a full set (not demo or 1/2 empty cartridges) toner.While the color output is not always on par with a mid to high end Inkjet, the SPEED blows every other color printer I've ever owned away! I was up and printing on my home LAN in less than 15 minutes. I just plugged the printer in to my home Router and it picked up a IP address. To simple. The drivers for WIN-ME and WIN2K appear stable and Minolta has great documentation and supporting website.I've been using 94+ bright white plain paper with good/great results. Most friends can't tell that the output is not from the photo lab. This paper is cheap folks.My inkjet was costing me $140+ per 100 pages of photos printed. ($1.40 to $2.00 a page) A set of standard toner cartridges for the 2300DL cost aprox. $240 (street) without the hassles of clogged nossels, sunlight fading or water damage.With all the positives I see going for this printer, I can't imagine why editors are not pushing the color lasers as a economical injet replacement for high volume printers like myself.GS.