Customer Reviews

Konica Minolta Magicolor 2450 Color Laser

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I did some research on color laser printers in the $400-600 price range. I really didnt see any bad reviews for Konica-Minolta Printers although there are a lot of very unsatisfied HP, Brother and Samsung customers. While I love HP inkjet printers, I have had bad experiences with HP color laser printers and feel that they are slow and often do not print great color depth.

I have read some reviews that talk about the Konica-Minolta printers not fusing the toner well, I found out by trial and error that there are 2 switches on the inside of the printer that you must turn to the right position in order to print on paper (instead of envelopes and heavy cardstock) This is why people felt the toner was not fusing well onto the paper.

All in all i have had this printer for about 2 weeks now and i absolutely love it. It really prints well. I encourage you to go to the local staples, compusa, etc. and compare prints from different brands. I feel that Konica-Minolta printers always print a little bit better than the other brands.

Have this printer for few months.
Overall would recommend it without hesitation to any small office/home networked environments.

Pros:
1. Very decent photo quality - a really big leap compared to older color lasers . I mean it. Not as good as photo inkjets, but after custom profiling it produces very nice prints at quality level of good magazine. I even have few framed prints from it and from normal viewing distance they look good. For photo printing you should always convert your images to 240ppi - this is it's real color resolution. For BW - 300ppi. Couldn't find this information anywhere and had to do a lot of test prints to figure this out.
2. Size - it's relatively compact and fits nicely on a regular desk.
3. Networked, postscript - all for around $500 and this is a real bargain if you have many different systems and users like I have at home.
4. When asleep drains about 13W of power and this is very nice.

Cons:
1. Noisy. It's drumming like a symphony orchestra when it prints, when you turn it on, when it's going to energy saver mode... Not a big deal for me, but don't use it at night - everybody at your house will know that you are printing something.
2. Sometimes hangs - firmware is a little buggy, but simple restart helps.

I bought a Konica Minolta magicolor 2450 printer last winter after reading several on-line reviews. My opinion is that the printer is useable, but I'm unhappy about the various problems I've run into.

My first problem was a lack of information on Konica Minolta's web site, a lack of information that leaves me feeling cheated.

The printer I purchased is used almost exclusively for on-demand printing of product brochures on 160g (approx. 40 lb?) paper. I had checked that the printer specifications said that it worked with 160g paper before I made my final decision. I ordered both the duplex unit and the second (larger) paper tray at the same time as I bought the printer. Then, after the printer was delivered, I discovered that the user manual says that the duplex unit and the extra tray can only be used with 90g (24 lb) paper!

Fortunately, it turns out that the duplex unit actually does work OK with 160g paper. But not the extra paper tray, which is therefore never used - a waste of money. (Incidentally, to reduce paper jams it is necessary to specify that the paper is "thick" when using 160g paper, and this reduces throughput.)

The next problem I had was that the colors are not at all accurate, making some photographs look awful. People's faces tend to be pink or blue. Fortunately, I had a printer calibration kit that had been acquired for a different printer, and I was able to create a color management profile for this printer.

If I had not had this kit (a Monaco EZ Color product) I would have had to buy a printer calibration kit, an expense of several hundred dollars.

I've also had many problems when using this printer with Adobe InDesign.

Sometimes a two-page brochure is printed with the second page upside-down! The work-around is to first produce a PDF, and then print from the PDF. There is a different work-around on the Konica Minolta support forum, but that doesn't work for me. And the support personnel at Konica Minolta are very unresponsive. My last e-mail to the person assigned to my case has gone unanswered for three weeks.

Even with the printer calibrated there are many color problems when printing documents with pictures directly from Adobe InDesign. This may be an Adobe problem, but that seems unlikely. The solution is to always produce a PDF and then print the PDF.

I've also experienced some print quality problems. After only 2000 impressions I had to clean the laser lenses because of vertical stripes on the pages. And some documents with large fields of one uniform light color are printed with uneven color, which looks bad.

A final problem is that the printer is fairly noisy, as noted by several other people.

Basically, the printer does do the job but the lack of compatibility with Adobe InDesign is very irritating, and the print quality is not all that great.

Rennie Petersen

I needed good quality waterproof results. I loved Epson pigment inks. They were not only waterproof but you could print bumper stickers, outdoor announcements, photos, brochures, t-shirt transfers and even temporary tatoos at a high definition. The problem is that one needs to constantly use the pigment ink to avoid them clogging the head nozzles and if they clog, the printer cleans itself by spitting more ink. So the ink consumption was very expensive and within a year or so the inkjet printer may become permanently clogged.

I always considered color lasers but their price was high, they are very big, and there was still complaint on the low quality of graphics and photos. Well I found researches that tested the Magicolor 2450 and they said it offers the best photo/graphic quality they have seen in color lasers. Their prices keep dropping specially the Magicolor 2450 which it seems like it will be substituted very soon by newer models which may not be built as good as this one. I read that Minolta wanted to make a special statement with the 2450 to say that color lasers can do as good job printing pictures as the inkjets.

I bought it hassle-free from Tiger Direct and received it sooner than what I expected for standard shipping. It's one of the smallest color lasers. It doesn't offer clear installation information but if you have experience with printers it will be mostly self-explanatory.

It took me long time though to figure out why the printer and computer weren't communicating. I first tried connecting to PC win ME via ethernet router then through parallel following their (poor) instructions and then with my experience but it hanged when trying to install the driver. So I will try to install them manually like I had to do eventually with my two apple mac computers.

Both apple computers (10.28 & 10.4) found the printer fast through AppleTalk. I think it was good that I assigned the printer a permanent IP address from the PC first. Still the right drivers for the macs to be able to talk to the printer were installed manually after the self-install didn't do the job. I'm sure I will be able to make it happen for the PC later. So the 2450 is working perfectly as a fast network printer for my apple computers.

If you don't have experience with printer drivers and printer installations I wouldn't try installing this printer. Why am I still giving it 5 stars? Because of its own merits. I don't think this guy should be penalized for the Japanese person that failed to fully explain the installation alternatives and offer troubleshooting help. Not even their website was helpful. Once you get this printer installed right... BEHOLD! High quality photos from iPhoto, labels, brochures, cardstock, documents, graphics from Illustrator on plain paper without banding... gradiants are smooth; the text is so black and crisp even at the smallest font size. It obeys exactly anything the macs tell it to do. The photos are no different than my previous Epsons (just may not print glossy enough for you but can send to a photo-lab). I'm sure I will start finding photographical issues later but it produces high quality prints the way it is. So, I don't mind unscrambling its installation difficulties as long as it delivers what I needed in the first place.

There is a Phaser color printer built as good as this one with the same components but I investigated that the cost for the toners is much higher for the Phaser than for this Minolta version.

The color is great, but it is hard to believe how negligent and incompetant they were in creating their widely sold printers (in all Staples stores,etc). Ridiculously noisy, extremely long warm up cycle, which occurs EVERY time you open the lid, etc. Constant "jams" because the rollers do not pull the paper properly, no way to retsart after a "jam" except to lift the lid and wait for the 2 minute warm up cycle, using anything but the cheapest thin paper will cause all kinds of pseudo jam problems, will cancel your job for you (thanks), and very bizarre preferences in terms of matching paper type as listed in printer, with paper type in your software.. If they dont match, it is a printer error (duh), causing you to take 2 or 4 extra steps every time you print.

I have had this printer for three years or so; it has been all trouble. The worst is it often fails to pull the paper from the tray, and gives the error message "Paper jam in tray 1", although there is no paper jam. I tried different weight papers, but no help. Occasionally, it will pull a page and print. When it gives the paper jam error message, you have to go through a lengthy warmup-calibration, etc. schedule, and then it tries to pull paper and fails again. The bottom line: it is not worth your time, money and frustration.

We've had this printer about three years, and it has not been a good purchase. First, the network card in the printer did not work. Unfortunately, I discovered this problem after the warranty expired, so to make it reachable via the network I had to run print jobs through the computer to which it was attached until I finally broke down and purchased a print server several weeks ago.

Second, print quality is horrible. Large blocks of color end up with faded vertical stripes. I don't know if it's time to replace the drum, but it's been doing this for a long time. We only have about 6,100 pages on this thing, so it shouldn't be worn out.

The menu system is also incomprehensible - this printer has probably the worst on-board interface I've ever seen. The documentation is terrible. Two pages of information in about 30 different languages.

We're shopping for a new printer and staying as far away from the Konica-Minolta brand as possible. The money we spent on this one? I call it the Stupid Tax.

I have owned dozens of printers, due to my job. I'm not prone to hyperbole, but this is the worst printer, BY FAR, that I have ever worked with. It is incredibly noisy, but the worst part is that the network connection is utterly useless.

To begin with, it took several updates to get the printer to be recognized on the network. This was mentioned in the Macworld review, but the firmware of the unit I bought was later than the firmware upgrade in the reveiw or on the Web site, so I was disappointed in that.

More than anything else, we get Printer Not Responding errors 9 out of 10 times we print. 100% of the time after the Energy Saver kicks in, it won't wake up from the network even with the AppleTalk protocol (a solution suggested elsewhere). The server that is supposed to be in the printer has NEVER worked for us, although another reviewer got it to work only on each startup (never again after Energy Saver mode became active.

The quality of the output is good, but I haven't been able to print enough to agree with the expense of replacement parts. The only way we can print even REMOTELY reliably is via USB, which defeats the purpose of the purchase.

I hate this printer and buying another Konica/Minolta product is very unlikely.

I don't know if this is the best color laser printer but it works just fine for me. The setup instructions were not very clear and I had to do some printer name changing to get it to work on my network. I have not had a single problem once it was setup.