Customer Reviews

Konica Minolta magicolor 2200 Color Laser Printer

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

For the money, this is a fantastic printer. First, installation was a breeze. The product comes with a quick setup guide and a thicker installation guide. I read over the installation guide and used the quick setup guide for its excellent illustrations. Make sure you read over everything before you install. You need to be careful that you install all pieces correctly or you could damage the printer. There are more parts to this machine than you will find with most printers, but the directions were concise and offered plenty of explanation. Software setup was easy.

Print output is good and speed is as advertised. Like another reviewer, I found the computer to be loud on startup. However, once it is going, all you can hear is a slight humm. I had no problem whatsoever with printing in Excel. Also, I printed out some pictures on plain paper and I was very satisfied with the results. Minolta suggests what kind of photographic paper to use for this laser. Visit their website at ... for more information. I do not think you should use inkjet paper. Some of the features I found appealing is the built in ethernet connection and the 32mb of ram that come with the system. These features alone are worth quite a lot to me.

I have seen inkjets and I have never liked them. If you print on an HP and rub the paper with your thumb, it will noticeably streak and smudge. I would be embarassed to submit a resume or any document that is important on these types of machines. I tried to smudge the output on this printer and it passed the smudge test with flying colors. Other inkjets, like Epsons, do not smudge as badly as HPs but they tend to print black poorly.

Goodbye inkjet and hello affordable laser. At last a color laser for less than a $...(after rebate of course)! I got this printer for my wife who has a home office and she loves it too.

I wrote this review because I do not feel like the existing review for this product does it justice.

After my wife wearied spending hours nursing our combination of HP computer/HP 1120C ink jet printer into printing weekly color church bulletins and newsletters, we decided to try this color laser printer.

Granted, if you only print an occasionaly 5x7 or 8x11 color photograph from a digital camera, you might want to stick with your inkjet and Kodak photographic paper.

But if you need a color laser printer for your business,church or home graphic printing operation, this Minolta Magicolor may be your ticket.

Set up was pretty easy. The beast weighs over 85 lbs unloaded (without color cartridges and paper)...we had no problem in our older house with circuit breakers based upon the amperage this machine draws. No lights dimmed. Set up took about 90 minutes, including an error we made not closing a door panel securely and then having to download the appropriate Windows XP driver from the Minolta-QMS website (which in itself took a few minutes---XP drivers weren't included on the CD that came with the printer: only ME,95,98, NT, 2000). Fortunately the Minolta website driver, apparently updated March 18, 2002 worked fine with Windows XP and we're up and running. No problem printing with Microsoft Word or Publisher from the get go.

Printing time is down from about three hours on the inkjet for color church bulletins (featuring art work from the masters like Rembrandt on the front cover) to about thirty minutes. And of course the results look professionally printed---color laser doesn't smear if a raindrop or bead of sweat falls on it like it does with an ink jet printer product.

And black ink pages just pop right out of the QMS 2200---up to 20 per minute compared with "you know how long" with an ink jet (even set on econo print).

Finally, costs for the QMS three color and one black cartridges rated at 6000 pages per cartridge should be a lot less than the innumerable ink jet cartridges we seem to run through. Plus with most ink jets, if you use all the "red", you have to replace the whole color cartridge. Not so with three color cartridges, each rated at 6000 copies...

PC Magazines' top rating for this printer got our attention, and we're glad we tried it out.

My review is actually more about the Magicolor 2210 GN than the Magicolor 2200 Desklaser but I think this will still be useful insight for those of you shopping for a printer. In my quest for a color LP I looked at the 2200, 2210 and the HP Color Laserjet 4550 before settling on the 2210. I didn't get to see the 2210 before I purchased it but now that I own one I can make the comparison between all three. Bottom line, if you can possibly afford the extra [money] get the 2210 GN .

The 2200 seems like a good printer for a thousand dollars (pretty darn inexpensive) but there are caveats. Its test print to me looked better than that of the HP 4550 which costs (at the time I write this) [money] inclusive of rebate. For print quality alone I might have choosen the 2200 over the 4550 even though the 4550 is more full featured with it's Postscript support etc.. The 2200 has 1200 X 600 color resolution whereas the HP 4550 has 600 X 600 with some resolution enhancement that is advertised to make it more like 2400X2400. Judging sample prints, using both my naked eye and a magnifying loop, I noted that the 4550's text looked unsharp and the test image didn't seem near photo quality although HP's sample print did not have a proper image for telling photo quality. Under the loop I could see the resolution enhancement didn't work well along edges which is likely why the text looked un sharp. In contrast, the 2200 had nice sharp color text (even the fine text) and the image on the sample print showed a red bird which did give a good idea of its photo quality. I would say the 2200 was "near" photo quality and better than the HP both for text and photos.

The 2210GN is worth the extra money if you consider it probably will be the last printer you'll purchase for years to come. It has a nice form factor (same as 2200), and does not seem to be a power hog as some suggested about the 2200(has an energy saving mode). It comes with a 1year ON SITE warranty. Repeat ON SITE. Minolta phone support wait times are not long either: I had one issue with it not printing when it went into energy save mode. Flashing the bios corrected this and Minolta support stepped me right through it in about 5 minutes over the phone. Good printer good support and although it is possible I will discover some problem down the road, so far I'm extremely pleased.

After receiving this printer, I not only loved the quality out of the box, I loved the quality of the printed product. In my humble opinion, the printer is made with top quality components. The instructions are very clear, making setup a breeze. Image quality is great! You may not get the same quality photo images that you can get with a high end inkjet printer and the right paper, but the speed more than makes up for this. Text is crisp and very clear. Color graphics are also crisp and very clear. Start up is a little noisy, however this is not a concern for me. The best part of a color laser printer is that you don't have to use those expensive specialty papers (like inks jets) to get professional results. You can't go wrong with this one. Great price too!

We bought this product because of the large amount of color presentation material that we were printing at Kinko's etc. It has paid for itself in the first three months that we have had it. It's a great piece of equipment at 999.00. It took about two months for the rebate check to get to me. I would buy another in a second if we needed it. I agree with next review that we had a few problems getting it up and running due to a firmware problem. After the new firmware was in, no problems.
Now the new stuff 8 months later
It has problems printing some formats. Make sure you check your resolution when printing in excel or it will not print. Finally managed to get it on our network after three calls to support. Just had to replace the black toner and fused oil roller. Looks like it might be more cost effective to junk the printer and buy a new one due to the replacement costs of the components. It is a power hog. Have blown the circuit it is on several times(shares with our big copier) I will buy another one most likely

Love the fact that I was able to print 7000 color pages with it. Pretty good quality. Can't beat color copies for 15 cents a page.
Just replaced the Black Cartridge last week, This week the Oil Roller went out. It is going to cost me more then the printer to do the 7500 copy replacements. It is a power hog. When it prints the lights dim.
I'm going to buy another one because it's cheaper then fixing this one and Buying the four toner cartridges.

I got the magicolor 2200 for a small office (10 users). A B/W HP laser with a network card..., and we got color for the same price! Setup was pretty straightforward, however the manual could be better. It was set up with a static IP on the network and worked perfect on all clients (W95/98/2000). Very fast in B/W, great print quality. Color is also great. Don't expect print photo quality, but better than most inkjets at it. I did have a problem printing to Excel, but a call to their support line fixed it quickly. Overall it's a great value. I have not seen anything close to this one with the features for the price.

The printer installs easily if you use a parallel report. Printing from MS Excel is a chore until you call the tech support and they tell you to set the dpi. This problem is eliminated with the updated drivers which are downloadable from the website. Make sure you download the Desklaser drivers and not any others (as I accidentally did). Also, there is no way to have the driver save the options you select when printing from other programs like Word; you must just hit enter after your selections because there is only a "Restore defaults button." Additionally, I had to laugh when the first reviewer said it makes his lights dim -- he's right -- it is a power hog. I have line smoothers and UPS's to protect my equipment and they do not correct the whole problem. It says it only pulls 8 amps (vs 11.4 for an HP5Si), but it appears to be pulling 12 or so (I did not measure this -- guessing only). Despite all the above, the output is clean, crisp, and dry. That other reviewer is right also when he says that you cannot use this printer for graphics work, but for general spreadsheet and word processing printing the printer is fantastic. Just like any other piece of equipment, after you work out the bugs, it works very well. Hope this review helps.

I set up this printer last night. So far, I have only a few minor complaints. The software installation instructions are very weak. If you're plugging this into a parallel port, it's probably a snap. But I tried to use the ethernet port. You have to install this "crown port" thing. Basically, it makes the network printer act like a local printer. So when you click on add printer, you have to tell windows that it has a local printer (scroll down, it's there), even though it's really a network printer. The manual forgets to tell you this. There is an electronic manual burried on the cd somewhere that mentioned this. But it took me about a hour to find. It also doesn't support DHCP, so you'll have to manually set the IP address in the menus in the printer. Also, don't set the subnet mask, leave it at 0.0.0.0.

I also noticed the flickering lights that one of the other reviewers noticed. It's extremely minor though. I have to really be looking for it to notice. I suspect the severity of the flicker depends on the wiring in your home or office. It's nowhere near serious enough to warrant buying a different printer though.

Other that that, it's great. Pages come out with bright colors and bone-dry. A nice change from the old ink-jet. It's fast too. It's faster in color than my old laser was in black-only.

If this printer had DHCP, PCL5, postscript, and a better manual, I would have given it five stars. But you have to pay double to get those features in other color lasers.

Was looking to replace old HP laserjet 5xl (constant feeder problem), and saw 2200DL in PCWorld review. ... Decided to take a chance after salesman promised a full refund if I had any problems before 14 days. Setup was a breeze. The hardest part was lifting it up the stairs, unpacking, and putting it on a table. Definitely need two people to do this. It came with the toner catridges installed. Setting up the network config took less than a minute. Downloaded the xp drives from the website and installed it even though it was not xp certified. Did not have any problmes. Black and whites look great. Color prints don't look as good as professional grade printers, such as the Xerox/Teks at work. But for such low price and with color, it's worth much more. This printer does use lots of power, but should be okay with any modern wiring. At 1000 watts, it should use as much as your microwave. Did not noticed any lights flickering, but my ups did click a few times. Overall, this product is highly recommended.