Minolta Magicolor 3300 color laser review

The Minolta Magicolor 3300 color laser is a serious high end business printer. With a price tag of just under $2000 you should expect a lot and the Minolta 3300 delivers with very fast color printing speed.

Minolta Magicolor 3300 color laser
Pricey but good

Speed is this printers main claim to fame, the magicolor 3300 reacts fast, printing up to 26 pages per minute (letter), 24 ppm (A4), in black & white and full color. A tandem, single-pass engine powered by PRISMLASER Technology gives the magicolor 3300 its quick, performance.

The magicolor 3300 has got the usual support for Windows, Mac, UNIX, and Linux. It also includes a 10/100BaseTX Ethernet interface for high-speed user accessm which is nice but expected for the price.

Why would the Minolta 3300 be suitable for your office?

Well you get very nice 1200 by 1200 dpi printing at high speed and a generous 256 mb of standard memory. This compares very well with the color laser offerings from HP. You of course get an option of adding a hard disk which is great for very large color document sizes.

Here are the specifications:

black: up to 26 ppm
color: up to 24 ppm
Total Media Capacity 1600 sheets
1200 dpi x 1200 dpi for both black and color
up to 60,000 pages a month duty cycle

As you'd expect for a business printer the Minolta comes with a reasonable standard input paper capacity with 100-sheet multipurpose tray and a 500-sheet Standard cassette. You also can get an optional 500-sheet or 1,000-sheet (2x500-sheet) lower input feeder. You also get an automatic duplexer for two-sided printing on the DN model.

All this adds up to a solid business printer for the money.

Running costs are not too bad either with long lasting consumables. Replacement toner cartridges are reasonably priced and black toner: yields up to 9,000 letter/A4 pages @ 5% coverage while cyan, magenta and yellow toner: yield up to 6,500 letter/A4 pages @ 5% coverage.

What's not to like about the Minolta Magicolor 3300?

Basically the reputation of the Minolta brand. On paper this is a very powerful printer but as printers but all the speed and resolution in the world won't help if you can't get the software side of things to work stably

Having said that this printer is easy to set up on a network and has generated good long term reliability reports.