T said:
According to a review in the latest PC Magazine (sept. issue), "As a
group, color laser printers have two serious disadvantages compared
with ink jets: higher prices and lower-quality photo output. Price
will likely always favor the ink jets, but the Minolta-QMS magicolor
2350 EN ($1,100 street) may change perceptions about inferior quality:
It boasts photo output that puts many ink jets to shame."
Here is the url to the reivew:
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article/0,3048,a=46275,00.asp
Does anyone have any comments based on experiance with THIS model?
Thanks!
I just got a QMS 2350EN about a week ago for about $900 online with
free shipping and no tax. We also got a digital camera, a Kodak 6340.
I am not a serious photographer or desktop publisher. But I have a
critical eye and enjoy doing both. I needed a camera that my
non-technical wife could use and a printer that would print nice
photos easily. We wanted to do a full digital switch from 35mm and
ditch the inkjet for printing. Was it successful? Mostly. Here are my
observations:
1. For spot colors (not photos) the 2350 is great. The colors are very
accurate. I printed out the Pantone pages and they matched very
closely to my screen. Spot color prints are fairly fast, close to the
rated 4 pages/min for color.
2. The Kodak 6340 is a 3.1 mega pixel camera. It may not provide quite
the image quality to support the capabilities of the camera. Hence, if
there is any shake when the picture is taken, the printed pictures are
blurry. When I get a blurry print, it is almost always indicative of a
blurry shot.
3. Printing color photos is pretty good. They can be a little fuzzy
and not completely clear, but they are good enough for us, especially
in a 4x6 size. They are not glossy, but we find the pictures can be
easier to look at that way. Personal preference. The photo prints
appear to me to be as good as the best prints off my Canon S600. To
print a high resolution color page takes about 2 minutes to process
the PostScript and about 15 seconds to print. Note that printing
multiple copies of the same image allows the printer to reach the 4
ppm speed.
4. My major complaint with the color is that the black portions of an
image can get dark and hide detail. I have played around with the
color settings and made this better, however, some of the light areas,
get too light. Bottom line, it prints close to what is on the screen,
but not exactly. I wish they had a better color system, I think the
printer could do better given better firmware or software. If it could
only do as well with pictures as it does with Pantone. I have done all
my prints on regular cheap laser paper, so there might be some better
stock to use.
5. Black printing works great and is very fast. It also seems to sense
when it does not need to print color and simply uses the black
cartridge alone.
6. I have a small home office and it is a little noisy when changing
cartridges (which happens 4 times for each color page), but not too
bad. The warm up cycle is about 2 minutes as well.
7. Consumables are tracked internally in the printer via printed pages
or the web site. I haven't burned through the first set of toners yet,
but I am well on the way with the black with the average percent
coverage about %10. The colors are around %3. I am printing a
combination of photos, regular black, and black and color documents.
8. Setup was a breeze and the menu system is fairly intuitive. The
printer web site provides a good amount of information. The good
documentation is found on the documentation CD and not in any printed
material.
9. I have also printed on heavy stock and labels. It did both fine, I
notices that it moves them through slower that regular paper. You have
to tell it in the printer properties what kind of paper you are using.
Legal also seems to work fine. I have not been able to get it to do
full bleed prints on 4x6 stock to fix the problem of having to cut the
prints down to side.
Would I do it again? I think so, but I'm not sure yet. Cutting
pictures is a drag. Getting good quality 8x10s 5 minutes after I take
them is good. I think I would check out some of OKI models as well;
they don't have the higher resolution and I haven't done a side by
side comparison of quality. The OKI is also about 3 times faster on
the color. However, if it has to process the Postscript for over a
minute like the QMS, then the speed really isn't that important, at
least to me. I still think we will have some of the digital photos
processed professionally and hopefully the toner won't eat our lunch.
Overall, a good printer. I'm happy, but not ecstatic.
Just my amateur 2 cents,
Take care,
Grant
