Very good laser at ink jet price
Written: Jan 24 '02
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Pros: Speed, features, resolution of a much more expensive laser printer
Cons: cost of replacement toner
The Bottom Line: Highly recommended. Great features, speed, print quality and price. Just realize that replacement toner cartridges are expensive.
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| beeflog's Full Review: Konica Minolta PagePro 4100W Laser Printer |
I got tired of the slow speed, blurry text, and incredibly short life span of ink jet printers and decided to get a laser for home use. We have two dead ink jets (Epson- clogged nozzle, Lexmark- who knows, it simply died after a few months). The Minolta-QMS 4100W was advertised as a small workgroup printer with a high duty cycle, 1200x600 dpi, 18ppm, PCL and postscript, for only $200 on sale. I considered a Brother but it lacked postscript support.
Some initial things you should know. Contrary to the description in the Minolta web site, the printer can do 1200x1200 dpi and it has a USB connection. Pleasant surprises. Unpleasant surprise: replacement toner cartridges are $200. Granted it's rated at 9000 pages but that's still expensive. And the cartridge that comes with it is only rated at 5000 pages.
Setup. No problems setting up either parallel or USB, in windows 2000 and 98. Just follow the manual. The total time of installing from unpacking to printing was about half an hour.
Drivers and software. Again no problems. The installation disk didn't come with windows XP drivers though...only 98, ME, NT4, and 2000. They may have XP drivers on their web site.
Memory installation. It comes with a measly 2 Mb so I bought 64 Mb (100 pin DIMM) from Crucial for $24. There's only one DIMM slot and 66 Mb is the total maximum memory. Installation went by the book.
Networking. You need to buy a NIC, which I didn't, so I haven't tested this feature.
Print quality and speed. Quality is great, as good as I've seen from a laser printer at any price. It's quite fast although I haven't verified that it can do 18 ppm.
The bottom line is this is a terrific deal at $200, and would still be a good deal at double the price. It compares well with the $1000 HP laser printers at work. One slight nuisance is the status display consists of little LEDs rather than LCD text. So to interpret an error message you need to consult the chart that's next to the LEDs. I'm really happy with the 4100W...at least until I have to fork out for a new toner cartridge.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 200
Operating System: Windows
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Epinions.com ID:
beeflog
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Reviews written: 3
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