Customer Reviews

Konica Minolta Magicolor 1600W Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I'm printing tickets in b&w and passes with photos in color. And I'm also making signs with a vinyl cutter. So, I print a sheet of tickets in b&w. beautiful. Now I try printing the passes with the color photo. THE COLOR PHOTO ON WHITE CARD STOCK CAME OUT WAY BETTER THAN MY INKJET ON PHOTO PAPER! WOW. Blown away. OK, now I'm getting reckless. I cut a piece of sign vinyl 8x11 and put it in. I'm thinking the fuser could melt the vinyl and my brand new printer could turn to umhm in seconds. Or would rub off. Nope, it printed beautifully and fused just fine to the vinyl. It's not often you buy something and it turns out way better than you expected.

One more thing: Did you check the price of the toners for this thing? That's right, $270 for all four toners. Or $370 for the high capacity toners. They are selling this copier for a loss, hoping to make it back on the toners. Well, Konica Minolta folks, don't read this, but I'm buying another one just for the toners. (and the drum $89) (and the fuser unit $110) (and having a spare printer instead of buying the extended warranty $119)

UPDATE 1. April 12, 2010: The low toner light came on for the black after about 300 pages. after printing another 150-200 pages the printer stopped. (out of black toner) I didn't have time to try the toner refill kit, so I put in a high-capacity black toner ($79) and everything is fine.

UPDATE 2. November 19, 2010: still on the original color toners. I'm getting ready to print a big color pass order for a film festival. OOPS: loaded a sheet of sign vinyl upside down, wrecked the fuser roller. Must I order a new fuser for $109.95 plus 9.95 shipping, and tell the client to wait for 10 days? NOPE, just opened the spare printer, swapped fusers, back on line in 2 minutes! (the toners, fuser, and drum in this copier are all modular, they slide in and out - a truly excellent design) the extra printer has already paid for itself and I haven't needed the toners yet!

UPDATE 3. September, 2011: Doing a big batch of art gallery invitations, full color both sides, black background on one. I recently got a big inkjet printer, an Epson PHOTO 1400, and I decided to try that. NOPE, the laser printed MUCH BETTER, darker blacks, not to mention much quicker and cheaper and, of course: no smearing. The yellow toner light just now started blinking and the fan is making a funny noise (I think as a result of the vinyl accident). So when the copier shuts down (if it does) because of low toner, I'll switch fusers and start using my backup printer, and save this one for parts...

UPDATE 3½: Finished my 100 cards (50 pages of glossy card stock), now all 3 color toner lights are blinking. My fault - I used a 4-color black for the black background on my cards to get that wonderful deep black which the ink jet couldn't match, and that used up a lot of toner. The cards look great, though.

UPDATE 4 January 2012: Finally stopped (out of color toners) So did I go to Sears and pay $245.70 for 3 color toners? NOPE, I just put this printer in storage and got out my spare printer that cost me ninety six bucks, and I'm printing again.

The 1600W had been recommended to me by a Konica Minolta representative during a telephone conversation in which I explained that my current Konica Minolta Magicolor 2300DL (which I loved) was finally dying out. Upon receiving the new 1600W, I tried to print flyers on 110 lb card stock (which I frequently do) only to find out that the printer kept jamming and the printed copy was awful. When I called Konica Minolta to advise them of my problem, I was told that the 1600W does not support card stock and would only take a maximum of 58 lb paper. Needless to say, I was upset and disappointed, as that was not a topic that was covered in my conversation with the KM rep. I thought she was recommending a printer that was comparable to the 2300DL, but obviously not. If you planning on using ONLY paper, the ease of use, print quality, and noise level should be fine. I DID return the item, and I must say that I was very impressed with the "no hassle" attitude of the seller. It definitely pays to shop through Amazon for service and dependability.

this is a very good product for the price.. i don't print much, so it is fine for my small business. i have to say the color quality is much better that i thought it would be. it is noisy but for price and quality of the print i can live with it. i've only had mine for a few weeks now, but i haven't had any problems yet. the only thing i suggest if you're looking to buy this product is check the price regularly, because it fluctuates between $119 to $199.

This is a great value for the money and the print quality is fantastic. I was also impressed by the speed. It used to cost about $500 for a decent color laserjet, so to get one for $150 or less is great. It is similar in size and quality to ones that we use at my work (I work in a law office). I did have some big problems initially, so I have to subtract a star for that. The setup was fairly easy- you basically remove all the packaging and connect the usb and power cord. The driver install was OK, but I was disappointed that I did not get any "driver install successful message" or any prompt for a test page. I went to print a photo and got a flashing orange "error" light. I had to run a 2nd program which they include that told me that status of the printer was "memory full". I kept getting a "memory full" error no matter how small the file (even a 500 kb photo). I turned the printer off and on, checked all the cables, rebooted the PC. Nothing worked. So I ended up having to go to the Konica Minolta website to download a new driver. That didn't fix the problem. So then I had to download two kinds of new firmware and that finally resolved the issue. It killed about 2 hours of my time troubleshooting this. I have Windows Vista 64-bit, so it's possible there were compatibility issues and perhaps other people will not have this problem. But I would encourage everyone to go to the Konica Minolta website and download the latest driver and firmware BEFORE using this product.

I recently got a Magicolor 1600W, and set it up.

Screwy problem #1: The instructions are essentially hieroglyphics. There are no words, just pictograms that aren't always as clear as one might prefer. Eventually I got it unpacked and installed, and got the drivers installed.

Once installed, the print quality is great, and it prints pretty fast. Not as fast as the big lasers at work, but a lot faster than any inkjet I've ever owned. Looks better on most things than the inkjets as well.

Screwy problem #2: There appears to be no way to print a #10 envelope, or any other North American standard sized envelope. The promotional literature and other stuff says "prints envelopes", but neglects to mention that the user manual specifies that the printer only prints ISO/European DL and C5 envelopes, which aren't commonly sold here in the US, and there's no way that I've found yet to print a regular #10 envelope.

What makes me wonder is that if they made the questionable decision to sell and market the 1600W in the US, without supporting ANY common envelope types, what other bad choices did they make in the design of this printer?

I was a little worried when reading other reviews and finding some people have had trouble with an error message before even printing one page, but for the price I figured it was worth a shot. I made sure to download the newest driver for my operating system from the Konica Minolta website and figured if I followed the directions line by line how hard can a printer install be, I have never had a problem with the 2 other printers I already went through this year. Well as soon as the driver was installed and I was prompted to turn on the Printer I got the dreaded flashing error warning with a paper jam right away, before it even got warmed up. Well I loaded the paper correctly like it said to and I have the right type of paper so let me turn it off, pull out the jam and try again. Did that and bam same thing. I googled the model number and found out that on every fix website everyone is having the same problem and no one knows what to do. Some professionals say the cartridges may be misaligned and all this ridiculously crazy stuff but then I thought for a second, it is trying to feed paper in before the machine is even warmed up. How about if I just take the paper out even though the directions say to have it in. So I cleared the jam, turned off the printer and took out the paper and restarted the machine. Well it cycled through the warmup process and once the machine was flashing the green ready, I put the paper back in and tried printing a test page. It printed with no problems and I haven't had an issue since. It may just have been a fluke but if you have the same problem try taking the paper out and let the machine go through it's warm up cycle first, not everytime it warms up but just the first time when it prompts you during install to turn on the machine. Hope this saves you new buyers some time. I haven't had an issue since (knock on wood)but I will update this if I have any other problems. Please let me know if this stupid little trick works for anyone else.

This is a great color printer for the price. It prints black text really fast. Color print is slow, but the quality is great. This is what you would expect for a printer in this price range.

Noise is louder than an inkjet, but is understandable. It doesn't come with a duplexer, but that is okay since I only use it for college work/ general office work. I have printed almost 100 pages and it is still going strong. It comes preinstalled with the color and black toners.

I would recommend it.

This printer is for a PC for now. MAC computers are not supported yet.

The 1600W received positive reviews in my research and correctly explained its pro's and con's so I really have had no surprises. I am completely satisfied with this printer which I purchased one month ago through Amazon at a great price of $149.99. It shipped quickly from the 3rd party vendor and arrived in excellent condition. At first the color prints seemed to be a bit slow. But when recollecting the color print speed on my 5 year old HP inkjet printer, the color print speed is definitely much faster. My only concern for the future is the replacement cost of the print cartridges (about $65.00 for the b&w cartridge and about $100.00 for each of the color print cartridges). Overall, I think this is an excellent laser color printer and is perfect for my home and small business use.

Can a color laser printer this inexpensive (under $170) be any good? YES! For a week I kept looking at various color lasers at stores in town and online. Most of them were around $400 - 500. I read lots of reviews by computer magazines and individuals and they all had something negative to say. I just couldn't make up my mind. Then, I read the positive review about this printer in PC Magazine and figured that for such a small amount of money I could afford to make a mistake.

Well, this has been a joy. I still can't believe how good it is. The print quality and color quality of the text is outstanding. I showed several pages to colleagues at work and nobody could tell the difference between what I had printed and what we use every day at work. This is perfect for my needs at home.

I have not printed pictures, nor do I intend to. That's not something that interests me so I can't comment on how good it is doing that. But for quality text (including color text) this is excellent. The colors match what I see on screen. Green is a little off but the others are spot on. And it's plenty fast enough. Not sure this would work as a networked printer but for home it's perfect.

There are lots of options available that I haven't even fooled with. Maybe I could even tweak the green color more to match the screen. I don't know.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone. I was ready to spend $500 and I bet those printers wouldn't have done a thing better for me than this one.

I found this printer advertised on sale near my home today (6/13/09)and couldn't pass up the bargain price for such a feature rich machine that delivers professional results in your choice of color, black and white on letter or legal sized paper. Other customers in the store today with prior experience with this exact printer wanted additional ones to use in their homes or businesses and now I can see why after taking one home myself!

Since the bargain price was so low, the dealer only allows one per customer. I found one lone businessman who arrived and explained that he tried to get other family members to come with him so he could buy 3 of them but no such luck, he got the last of the remaining 3 right along with me. Another oddity was that some salesperson who tried to dissuade me from this product to another one offered later called the house and said that if there was any reason that I might be unhappy with it that they would pay me an additional $50 on top of what I paid-apparently employees are not allowed to buy the product at the sale price which was news to me!

With this printer you will find it able to deliver truly professional all color prints whether graphic or photos. Other neat features, you can create a 'watermark'(a shadowy lettering/message behind the text of documents) on your documents in the form of one you create for yourself or use any of the pre-made ones so that your documents can have customized features such as 'confidential,' 'do not copy' or 'top secret.' There's more, but since I just got it I don't know all of it yet!

Installation of printer drivers is easy taking less than 10 minutes and you can print, save or read the users manual. The unit itself weighs 31.8 lbs., fairly hefty as compared to other competitors in its type. Perhaps because of this it is fairly quiet as compared with another brand of high quality black and white only laser printer I wore out over the last year with reams of print jobs (thousands of resumes & still looking for another career position-'guess I will have to file for my 3rd extention if nothing pans out in the next couple of weeks!)

Since I just bought it today I will post here to let readers know how well it does over time that way you can know of actual consumer experience to help you in weighing your purchase decision-let's hope the next couple of thousand resumes perhaps with color accents going out result in something!