Clunky, Noisy, Toner Leakage, Paper Pickup Problems, Sensor Problems, Cheaply Built, The List Goes On . . .
Recommend to potential buyers:
no
Full review
We bought 6 of these printers back in early 2005 and after 1 year, were riddled with different problems - e.g. paper not picking up, numerous paper jams, "cyan/magenta/yellow/black toner not installed" error messages (will get to this one later), video underrun error (which basically colour washed the whole page it happened to be printing at the time.) Even after a month we had to call konica minolta to send out a printer engineer because 2 of our printers refused to pick up any paper, and these 2 still have trouble picking up paper even now.
The insides of these printers can get very dirty with toner which will cause a whole load of other problems like the "X toner not installed" error messages mentioned above.
It seems that due to what looks like a design fault - where by the electrical contacts for the printer cartridges are very near the exit point for toner on the cartridges and the main electrical contact which is used to interface with the cartridges is at the bottom of the chamber which holds the cartridges - because of this, waste toner (which is supposed to go back into the cartridge - so I was told by konica - but doesn't seem to) ends up at the bottom of this chamber which in turn ends up on the main contacts which then transfers the ink onto the contacts on each cartridge, which then throws up a "cyan/magenta/yellow/black toner not installed" error message. I actually cleaned out one of these offending printers, tested it, took it back up to our main office, no more than 3 hours after i'd left it there, it had come back up with another "X toner not installed" error with a load of toner at the bottom of the chamber. Then after getting it somewhat working again, the paper started jamming, so I had to give the staff in this office (only 2 luckily) a connection to a different, more reliable printer elsewhere (which they moaned about - but what can you do?)
The only reliable things about these printers is the built-in Ethernet connection, which isn't much good when the rest of the printer fails to work. Also when it actually prints, the quality is quite good.
We ended up chucking these 6 under a basement (because we can't throw them away due to the WEEE directive - what a shame) and buying 4 hp color laserjet 2600n's and a 3800n instead. We've had these printers in for over a year now and apart from changing cartridges, we have had absolutely no problems with them.
If I had to give a recommendation - it would be to stay well away from these printers and buy either a different model - i.e. magicolor 2300dl which have been fairly reliable for us, or a colour printer from a different manufacturer - i.e. HP, Epson or Canon to name three.
More details
Reliability
Very poor
Design
Very poor
Range of extra features / functions
Good
Instruction manual
Satisfactory
Manufacturer Support
Good
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