Konica Minolta magicolor 2300 DL Color Laser Printer

My deskjet 890c has seen better days, so I was looking for a fast printer with color capabilities and good quality print. For not much more than I paid for my last printer I got the speed, economy and quality of laser printing in my home office.

I have only had it for a few days, and have heard wildly different things about the last version of this printer that I thought I would share my experience with this printer after a few hundred pages.

I took advantage of the included network card and ran it into my siemens wireless router. I did have to call minolta to get it talking to the computer, but they answered after one menu and in one minute I was talking to a real live person. We reinstalled, synched up IP addresses and had it printing in about ten minutes. It prints beatifully, and you can print four full page photos in about the same time as my old inkjet. I think the page speed is accurate on this machine but with my old inkjet, it could take many times longer than the...Read more

Here are my observations from in-box, through install, to printing:

1. Good packaging, solid handles on the box. The device weighs 60+ LBs and the handles made it easy to manuever into my NOC.

2. Packaging was simple and efficient, printer has about 10 strings of blue tape to stiffen the joins for shipping. As a nice touch, all the tape ends were dog-eared making removal simple an painless. The documentation also clearly describes all the loactions so this process is simple.

3. Plugged it in, and turned it on. It's a little noisy but then my SUN Ultra 30 isn't exactly quiet so it doesn't bother me. I printed the configuration page and then the demo page and was delighted to see crisp, sharp output.

4. The printer comes installed with 32MB of RAM but the manual states that it will accept PC100 and PC133 SDRAM DIMM modules of either 128MB or 256MB. This is a great relief as I have an extra gig and I will put it good use now. The only drawback was that there is only one...Read more

Laser printers are potentially superior to inkjets because of the laser's unsmudgeable ink. However, for years the affordable laser printer with good resolution and good colors has been a mirage on the horizon. Finally, it has arrived as the Minolta Magicolor 2300 DL.

Can you tell that I am excited about this printer? I did not consider the companion printer, the 2300W, because of its lower resolution.

This sucker is heavy. It might be wise to get help before lifting it onto its table.

Installation was a bit rough. I'm on Windows ME, but the installation software did not offer a Windows ME option. I chose the closest, Windows 9x. You can also tell it which drive to install from, but why bother, it will just continue from where it started, right? Wrong. The software tried to read from my camera card reader and froze. I rebooted, restarted installation, and told it to install the Windows 9x driver from the CD drive. This worked.

I have downloaded the more recent...Read more