Great, Cheap Laser

I bought the Konica Minolta PagePro 1350W at Staples when it was on sale for 50$ from 180$. So far I am quite pleased with it.

Supply price

With the 3000-page cartridge it costs 2.6 cents to print a page for toner. (see update below) This is very good for a small laser. The drum has a yield of about 18000 pages at 100$, so it only costs about half a cent per page for the drum. I plan to buy a network laser when the drum kicks off though. It's not economical to buy the drum when I can buy a new printer with one and toner for 130. It will tell you in the driver how many pages have been printed and the toner level.

Setup

Setup is very easy. All you have to do is take it out of the box, shake the toner, plug it in to the wall and PC, and then install the drivers. Enough Said.

Paper Handling

There is one input tray and one output tray. The input is rated for 150 pages, with 20 lb. paper it fits exactly 186 pages without feeding issues though. It takes a page in, then runs it through the cartridge, fuser, then out on the top. It is a c shaped path. People complain about the output paper tray, but I don't see a problem with it as long as you fold it out all the way, not just half way. It never spills anything over the top this way, and will easily hold one hundred sheets of paper there. I have had it jam once, but it was easy to clear. All I had to do was remove the imaging cartridge and pull it out. Apparently it didn't like wrinkled tracing paper very much.

Driver/Panel Status

The printer has two led lights (ready and error) and a cancel button. It has several "codes" that tell you what it's doing. (Such as: blinking alternately is load paper). The button is a cancel button (the on switch is on the left side). It will cancel any job coming to it. The driver enables many standard settings (dpi, paper, etc.) but the status monitor gives you a detailed description of the printer status and how to resolve it if it is a problem. It will also give you the pages printed and level of toner in the cartridge.

Quality/Speed

The speed (I clocked as) is 21 ppm in 600X600 or 1200X600 and 10 ppm for 1200X1200. (It says up to 21 ppm).
It ran a 530 page manual in 25 minutes, sneaking paper in as it would run low. Only bad thing I noticed is that after the first 100 pages or so, the thing really heats up to the point where the stack can be too hot to handle. I emptied the tray for the fifth time after about 400 pages and I moved the stack as quickly as possible. The fan ran high for a few minutes after that job.
The quality of text is perfect in all qualities. In toner save mode, however, it prints in a 70ish % gray tone. The quality of graphics however is not that good. There is a great deal of banding and it is far too dark in 1200X1200 dpi, but in 600X600, it's not as bad (see update) and anyway, I have a Canon S9000 for that work!


UPDATE

The input tray broke on my printer after my 5-year-old brother smashed into it. I e-mailed them, asking where I could buy another. They wrote back saying this:


Thank you for contacting us.

From your email comments I see that you need a new lower paper tray for your printer as the old one has broken.

I am going to send you a new bottom paper tray free of charge. Also I will send you a spare upper tray free of charge as well. The trays should go out today by UPS 2nd day air.

Please contact the Konica Minolta Printing Solutions Customer Support Center if you have additional questions, problems, or issues with your printer.

Thank You,

Customer Support Team (T-887262)
KONICA MINOLTA PRINTING SOLUTIONS U.S.A., INC.

Because of this, I will add their tech support to the PROs.




UPDATE

I bought a refill kit from here: http://www.lasertekservices.com/product/1350W_1PK_WS

Refill worked absolutely perfectly! It is the way to go, they ship you a bottle of toner to fill the cartridge with, and a 6000 page reset chip. You pop the fill cap off and fill it. I'm printing 3 pages to the penny now!

I ran a 513 page document in 24 minutes, 30 seconds yesterday. I snuck paper in as it was printing to get an accurate judgement. This shows it truly is 21 PPM.

Graphics Quality-

Smaller photos show banding, full-page ones don't too much. I ran this against a Brother DCP-7020 on the same photo (full page). The Brother's photo was simply terrible. That printer can only print about 20 shades of grey, so there are abrupt changes between them. I could barely tell what the photo was of! I then ran it on the Konica. The greys are perfectly blended, but there is a fair amount of banding. If you look at it from 3 feet away or so, you won't notice though. It beat the brother by a long shot though.

POWER

Never mentioned that! This house was built in 1973, and the wiring is the same age. It flickers the lights when printing here. Of course, the circuit it's on has the following:

Two Computers
Two Monitors (CRT)
Various PC Hardware
Lights
Pioneer Surround Sound Sys.
TV...

Well, that isn't even half, so you get the idea. It's probably partially my fault for overloading the circuit to the point where it probably comes close to tripping (although it never has) The printer uses 900 watts, quite a lot! I ignore it, just a minor annoyance.

ANOTHER UPDATE

When this 6000 page refill runs out, it'll be about time for a new drum and I doubt the toner cartridge will take another refill either, making me have to spend about 220$ to keep going. I can tell the cartridge has lived through probably its last refill due to poor print quality which I notice with all graphics, but not text. I've decided to replace it with a Brother HL-2070N (refurbished), on sale for 80$ until the end of March at Staples. If I get that before this runs out of toner, I'll just save this one to run large manuals on when I need to. It still works perfectly fine, just be aware that you really can't refill a cartridge more than twice (Laser Tek Services tells you that though)

UPDATE

I gave this away to a friend who only had a Deskjet 400 or something like that. I filled the cartridge with some copier toner that I had around, and it prints text absolutely perfectly, graphics are iffy though, I've refilled it too many times to have reasonable photos. So he's got around 5000 pages free on it, I'm betting that'll last him 10 years plus! I almost wish I kept it as a backup , but my Brother has been running very nice.

By the way, first thing he said when he printed something on it was "^@&# That's FAST!"