Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W Review

Currently one of the lowest price color lasers on the market the Minolta Magicolor 2300W is pushing color laser printing into new areas.

Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W
Inexpensive color laser printer

At under $700 color laser printers such as the Minolta magicolor 2300W are becoming realistic options for home offices and small businesses. Rated at an acceptable 16 pages per minute for black and white and 4 ppm for color this printer can handle large workloads. Like all low end color lasers, it loops each sheet through four passes to apply black, yellow, cyan, and magenta toner. You have to pay a lot extra for the speed of single pass color laser print technology.

For the money this Minolta color laser printer makes sense

Designed to compete with high end inkjets it's faster and more smudge-proof, with a higher duty cycle, lower consumable costs, and superior output on cheap, plain paper. A cheap color laser printer like this makes a lot of sense.

The W in the name denotes this as a Windows only printer and you will find the software very easy to setup. This printer comes with the drum and toner cartridges already installed so getting the thing up and running is a ten minute job provided you have the upper body strength to lift this 61 pound printer.

The Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W lacks an Ethernet interface found on the $799 Magicolor 2300DL. You are stuck with just USB 1.1 and parallel ports. Print serving is very easy to do under Windows XP so in small offices an Ethernet port on a printer isn't that annoying.

Its 32MB of buffer memory can't be expanded as the more expensive Minolta 2300DL's or rival units' can but at this price it is hard to be critical. The Minolta Magicolor 2300W's 14 by 20-inch footprint (and 15.5-inch height) permit placement on a desktop instead of a separate printer stand. It has a rated duty cycle of 35,000 pages per month (based on a mix of three-quarters black and one-quarter color pages) and whose price is $200 below the lowest-priced 2500L model in the HP Color LaserJet 2500 series.

Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W
This is a good looking laser printer and doesn't take up too much room it does draw a hefty 1,100 watts and does produce some heat.

The Minolta 2300w has limited input paper capacity

The 2300W doesn't have a paper drawer so much as a simple slot in its left side for you to insert up to 200 sheets of letter or legal-sized copier paper or letterhead. It also accepts envelopes, laser-printer labels, and transparencies, but doesn't need and in fact can be damaged by coated inkjet paper. Pages exit face down (collated) on top of the printer. An automatic duplexing unit is a $399 option, but there's no way to expand input capacity beyond 200 pages.

The Minolta-QMS comes with preinstalled black, cyan, yellow, and magenta toner cartridges rated for 1,500 pages' use. High-capacity replacement cartridges are rated for approximately 4,500 pages, and cost $79 for black and $119 apiece for color. Those consumable costs climb somewhat, however, when you add the need to replace the waste toner bottle ($19; maximum 25,000 pages) and drum cartridge ($149) the latter's life is based on its number of rotations, which could theoretically be as many as 45,000 nonstop black pages but is more likely to be as few as 10,000 pages, with one-page jobs causing the most wear.

This really is a low cost no compromise option for small businesses. The Minolta-QMS Magicolor 2300W really does produce great results and at this price it is difficult to criticise. Minolta is a respected brand in the digital imaging industry and this printer proves their capabilities as a top color laser printer manufacturer.