QMS 2300DL print quality report
Jim Dechter
home and set it up as a non-networked printer via LPT1. There are minimal
instructions with it. The book is quite thick but there's only 15 pages or
so of instructions; they just needed a thick book to print them in 30
languages. There is documentation on the CD-ROM, but I haven't had to
resort to that yet. Once you strip out all the blue shipping tape, insert
the waste toner cartridge, and insert the media support tray, you're ready
to power up and install the drivers. The color tonor cartridges are already
installed.
The driver installation went smoothly although there is some
confusion when you are asked to select the printer that you are installing.
But I figured it all out.
I tried printing some different types of media. Plain paper works
well, although continuous tone (at 1200x600dpi) is not this printer's strong
point. It's not terrible, but it's not terrific. Go buy a dye-sub printer
for that. Colors are bright and bold. The driver lets you configure for
various types of media like labels and transparencies. I printed up some
colored return address labels for my Christmas cards and they worked well.
I printed up some detailed technical plots for a test of the transparency
printing and they looked very good. Colors showed up well, details showed
up well, the transparency comes out hot, but not melted. I just used
standard 3M laser printer transparency material.
I am very happy with the printing results. For $800 you get a
printer that is network-ready and does transparencies in color (unlike HP's
new 2500 printer). If your big need is for continuous tone printing, you
may want to look elsewhere, but not many laser printers are good at that,
anyway. For everything else, this printer is just fine and great for the
price!
--
"Habit is a great deadener"
Samuel Beckett - Waiting for Godot
Forrest Anderson
Dechter" <jimde...@msn.com> wrote:
> I am very happy with the printing results. For $800 you get a
>printer that is network-ready and does transparencies in color (unlike HP's
>new 2500 printer). If your big need is for continuous tone printing, you
>may want to look elsewhere, but not many laser printers are good at that,
>anyway. For everything else, this printer is just fine and great for the
>price!
Thanks for the report! Can I ask you to print out a some very small
text on plain paper - say 3pt-5pt Times - in CMYK and a few dithered
colours like Red and Green, to see how crisp and well-defined the
characters are?
You said:
>...continuous tone (at 1200x600dpi) is not this printer's strong
>point. It's not terrible, but it's not terrific.
Have you tried 2400x600dpi mode yet, or are you limited in memory for
the moment? I wonder how much difference the 2400x600 makes...
Readers may be interested to know that PC Magazine printed a review of
the HP2500 and the Minolta-QMS 2300DL at
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,689853,00.asp and highlights of
the reviews (in my opinion) were:
===============
HP 2500
Once set up, the 2500 works well enough, with high-quality text and
graphics output, and with photos printing at reasonably close to true
photo quality on plain paper. Just as important, performance is
appropriate for the claimed speed (see chart).
Be forewarned that the printer is surprisingly noisy (another reason
for not keeping it on your desk). It makes loud clunking and whirring
sounds when printing and throughout the 2-minute warm-up every time
you turn it on. Listening to this printer operate, it's hard to
remember that one of the reasons lasers took over in the office was
because they were so much quieter than earlier technologies (remember
daisy wheel and dot matrix printers?).
In general, the Color LaserJet 2500 is a reasonably good printer with
some eccentricities. Compared with the QMS printer, however, it simply
doesn't offer as much value.
2300DL
For starters, the Minolta-QMS magicolor 2300DL is $200 less than the
HP model, and it includes an Ethernet connection. Yet the 2300DL
manages to provide slightly better performance and output quality. It
also offers easier printer control, thanks to an LCD-based menu
instead of the status lights you'll find on the HP printer.
Like the 2500, it's relatively noisy for a laser printer, but not as
noisy at the 2500.
Output quality is excellent. Photos approach true photo quality on
plain paper and are clearly a notch or two better on the quality scale
than photos from the HP. Another nice bonus: On our througHPut tests,
the 2300DL outperformed the HP printer by a small margin.
All told, the Minolta-QMS 2300DL is an attractive printer at an
impressively low price. If you thought you couldn't afford a color
laser printer for your small office, branch office, executive
office—or even home office—think again.
=============
(Some bits of each review have been snipped - see the PC Magazine
website for the full text of each).
Forrest
--
Forrest Anderson for...@military-researcher.com
Edinburgh
Scotland
Jim Dechter
> text on plain paper - say 3pt-5pt Times - in CMYK and a few dithered
> colours like Red and Green, to see how crisp and well-defined the
> characters are?
The return address labels were 5 pt and the print quality was very good.
The printer test page prints the windows logo with red, green, blue and
yellow window panes and the red, green and blue look as solid and well
saturated as the yellow does.
> Have you tried 2400x600dpi mode yet, or are you limited in memory for
> the moment? I wonder how much difference the 2400x600 makes...
>
I haven't tried the higher resolution on continuous tone, yet. I printed
one 4"x6" jpeg photograph which at 1200x600 looked ok and probably would
look better at higher resolution on better quality paper. The full page
vector graphic sample file I printed from Micrografx Designer, autoad.dsf,
took about 10 minutes to transfer and print. If you intend to do that sort
of thing you probably want to invest in some more memory. The print spooler
indicated it was about a 400MB print job. And I have the printer connected
to the computer parallel port, which I'm sure slows it down a bit, too.
Thanks for posting the highpoints of the comparison review. It is true that
the printer makes a pretty good racket when you wake it up to print. And
there is an odor while it operates. But you can adjust the time it stays
awake before it sleeps (default is 30 min).
One of the other posters commented on the actual number of pages printed vs.
the advertised number before the consumables are replaced on a QMS 2200. Of
course I don't know yet how that pans out for the 2300, but he is right that
the shipped cartridges are smaller capacity than the standard cartridges and
the advertised capacity is only 1500 pages at 5% coverage. But I don't know
if the HP 2500 would be any cheaper to operate. Time will tell.