The Bottom Line: Please do not buy this printer. Save your money and go with a more reputable company you can trust. High toner and poor customer care make this a no go!
Carazariah's Full Review: Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W Laser Printer
Begin This printer has been used for less than 6 months and was purchased by a friend of mine for our church office. Being a small congregation, this printer sees light use and at first glance this printer seemed to fit the bill. It is first small and compact taking up little more than a small ink jet space it weighs in at 17lbs with paper and peripherals. It has a sleek design and is easy on the eyes. Also as a bonus it supports Windows 98 which yes, my church office is still running. :( Of course if you have an newer OS like Windows 2000 or XP it supports those too.
Nitty Gritty Stuff The printer is rated at 15k prints per month and the initial toner is scheduled for 1500 prints. Seeing that we print less than 1000 prints per month, we didn't see much need to spend the $200 to $300 on a heavier duty model. Also my employer uses Konica Minolta Copier/Fax All in one for a large office and we've had good success with it. So I wasn't against this purchase from the beginning.
Installation This was a snap the printer setup flawlessly in just under 10 minutes counting network setup and everything. The installation instructions were sparse but simple enough to follow. We connected it using the parallel port which is thankfully still provided, although our old church computer has USB it isn't the best way to print with Windows 98. (If you've tried Windows 98 printing you know what I'm talking about:))
Print Quality The printer initially printed spectacularly well and fairly quickly, although we found it much short of the 21ppm I mainly chalked that up to our slow computer system. However, it seems to be more in the page loads that it takes the printer a little while between pages to print near the advertised speeds. It also helps if you change the settings to lesser ink coverage, which is a nearly hidden feature in their cumbersome driver utility. I'm not sure if that's a Windows 98 shortcoming or if its uniform throughout but it sure caught me by surprise to have to navigate through so many screens to find the draft option.
Here's where it gets Messy While the initial prints and setup went flawlessly, I started hearing feedback from our church secretary about the printer within 1 week. Now normally, I honestly only give a little credence to complaints from our church secretary (Just being honest!:(,Don't shoot me!) Being that she tends to complain about nearly everything. However, it wasn't too long before the printers inability to reset itself and failure to connect began surfacing causing frequent hard reboots. Being that the computer is old, it's not hard to pass that off on the older computer, not the printer, but it wasn't an issue with the HP4 that we retired a few years back nor the HP 800 ink jet. So here we are about 4 months in and a new problem arises. It seems (BTW we replaced the initial toner about 2 months into the purchase) a new line has appeared on our print outs. Okay so we begin troubleshooting. . .
Believe it or not It gets Worse! I start this process by pulling up Konica's website and looking for help. Oh no, there is no support information. The web page is a disaster and FAQ's and basic troubleshooting information is absent. (Konica has added a FAQ and some basic troubleshooting since that happened a few months back) This isn't starting off well. I'm used to HP's level of service and support so no web help was a definite drawback! So off to the hand off. Seeing that this is something beyond a new toner or cleaning can handle (not that Konica offers any help for cleaning it) I pass this information off to the friendly person who recommended and purchased the printer.
Starting Well with Customer Care After initial response our friend indicates that Konica has admitted the drum must have gone bad and they need some more information to send out a replacement. Mainly they need to know how many prints we've completed, and this has to be researched to follow up.
Absolutely Horrible Follow through Upon looking this up the answer is just over 5200 prints in less than 6 months, we have replaced the toner and we are expecting a little less than 1000 prints remain on the toner and the drum according to the website should last for 20k prints plus so based upon the 1 year warranty, I and my friend expect Konica to honor their word and warranty. Well it seems Konica is not such a company and doesn't know the meaning of either Quality Control nor Customer Care. They refused to provide a replacement and refuse to help solve the problem.
Bottom Line You get what you pay for: This Sub $100 printer ended its life in 6 short months, thus making it a $170 waste of money. (Toner is outrageously expensive on this model) And when pricing out drum replacements you guessed it more than the cost of the printer $120 dollars to replace the drum. Well between the poor customer care and awful quality in only 6 months I have to say unequivocally:
Just throw this piece of garbage away! And if you haven't bought a laser printer ignore the big reviewers Cnet, etc on this one and check out the user ratings. It seems we aren't the only ones disappointed and disgusted with the high price of toner and the absolutely retched customer care.
Do you want to Check out a Great Printer See this. . .Multifunction Inkjet Review
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