We have had a color laser printer for about three years and my bragging about it all the time convinced my uncle to pursue buying one to go along with his new Dell XPS system that he'll be getting in a few weeks. I just got back from driving to Sams, Office Max, Staples, and Best Buy.
Our color laser printer is the Minolta Magicolor 2300DL. We bought it at Sams ~3 years ago for under $500 and it had the full toner cartridges (4.5K pages * 4). The toner was easily worth more than the cost of the printer. We have printed about 2K pages so far--about half on card stock--and have not had a single issue or hardly even a paper jam that wasn't user error. Other stores had it for the same price but with 1.5K page cartridges. What a DEAL!
In preparation, I printed a piece of paper with two images. One was the printer door open and extra paper below it, including a stack of several colors of paper. The other picture was colorful blankets with some Family Guy DVD cases. It turned out to be the ultimate test sheet because it had color values all over the spectrum with wood grain and fine lines.
He was after an all in one color laser. So here is what I found--dealing ONLY with print quality:
Brother: In the stack of yellow & green paper the green didn't even show up! It looked like all yellow paper! Unbelievably horrible green output. The wood grain looked grainy and much darker than my original printout was (and mine looks very close to the actual image).
Samsung: It had an overwhelming screen effect with bad wood grain performance.
HP: Colors did not match and the smaller detail was very much smeared and not sharp.
I think there was another (maybe Canon).
But we exhausted their entire line and my printout unbelievably surpassed the quality several fold! They don't carry any Minolta printers, either. Sams only had HP (where we got our Minolta 3 years ago) and Staples and Office Max didn't have any, either. Best Buy also only had HP.
We both agreed buying any of these would be a horrible mistake! The quality is pathetic compared to our Minolta! My next question is if the newer Minolta's compare to the one we have now?
But why are these pieces of junk even being sold? I'm so disgusted with HP, Samsung, Brother, Canon, etc. When we got our Minolta, Sams had an HP that I think is the same one they still sell today (which I think is the ugliest thing on earth). Plus, ours loads things from the sides so paper jams can be resolved on the side instead of in the back--getting back there is a pain.
Somebody help me out here! Seems like Minolta owns the color laser space but they aren't sold anywhere I can find! Any chance that the other manufacturers paid the big chains to not carry Minolta? What's going on?
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Topic: Ridiculous Color Laser Printer Trip (Read 1506 times)