Minolta CF2002 turbo

Oct. 6, 2003 (see bottom of page for latest updates)

We've had the QMS Magicolor2 units now since 1998. They have caused me a few headaches and cost us a small fortune in consumables. In fact if you're using over 20% toner coverage per letter page it will cost you around $1cdn per page for the printing alone!!

Seeing as we've had more and more problems like defective OPC cartridges (brand new out of the box) and in general these things are quite noisy in operation and 4ppm colour isn't the fastest anymore..... we decided to upgrade.

We're getting a Minolta CF2002 "turbo". They do tabloid size up to 11x17 fullbleed on 12x18 paper and can do 31 pages per minute letter size!! They are LED technology but not using an Okidata engine. This one is Minolta design using part-QMS technology as Minolta bought out QMS a while ago. Apparently now Konica is merging with Minolta making them #2 in the world for colour + b&w sales.

(shown with optional sorter/stapler, 2500sheet lower tray)

I should have the new Minolta unit installed the end of this week so I'll add my impressions to this page in a couple of weeks.

The unit's specs are quite impressive with fullbleed 11x17 capability, auto duplex, 31ppm, Fiery RIP controller with P3 700Mhz w/256mb ram, 10GB harddrive. The printer itself also has a 10GB harddrive and 512mb ram.

On the output quality side these units aren't quite as sharp or detailed when printing photos as the Canon CLC950 or CLC1150 but the colour is very even on the Minolta compared to the Canon with no visible horizontal or vertical banding at all. Uniform solid colour. The fact that the Minolta is the same price as the Canon CLC950 ($1000 less) and cheaper than the CLC1150 is a bonus. The CLC950 is only 7ppm speed and the 1150 is 11ppm which is still dead slow.

To put the speed into perspective, it takes almost 1 hour to print 100 letter size brochures on the Magicolor2 at slightly less than 4ppm. The Canon CLC950 brings that down to around 30 minutes. The Minolta will do the same job in under 7 minutes!! No comparison.

Pricing for the Minolta CF2002 "turbo" is just under $17k cdn, the CLC1150 is around $26k and the CLC950 is $16k. I should also mention that the Canon units would be refurbished at that price point. Serious advantage, Minolta.

Cost per page on service contracts, the Minolta is cheaper than the Canon units in letter size and 2 cents more in tabloid. Overall advantage to the Minolta.

We also got the optional booklet finisher on the Minolta not available on the Canon models. It can sort, multi-staple and bind booklets of up to 10 tabloid sheets or equivalent 40 letter size pages. Quite impressive.

Plus, if you want to buy the unit after the lease is finished, consumables aren't too bad. 10,000 pages black is around $30, colour around $65cdn. The image units aren't cheap though.

More info to follow ....

UPDATE:

Oct. 6, 2003 Recently we've had an image quality problem that turned out to be label material that was sucked off the backing paper and had gotten caught in one of the image units and the transfer belt. For Tips & Tricks click here.

Sept. 23, 2003 We've had a few minor issues with the machine. It is counting 2 letter size colour pages as well as 1 tabloid colour page for every tabloid colour page we print. In other words were being billed twice. The Minolta technicians have been here twice to correct the problem but never had the correct software or interface cable for their notebook computer to hookup to the unit as the CF2002P has no scanner which is normally used to access advanced functions. Seems the management of the service department at Minolta, Vancouver don't have a clue, avoid responsibility, and try to pass the buck. However it's not a major issue, just costs us some nice billing headaches.

After the last technician visit where he couldn't do anything anyhow, I asked where the waste toner bottle was and he showed me, by moving the finisher aside, opening the door at the left side of the printer. Anyhow, I had to leave for appointments as soon as he left. When I came back to print a large print job the finisher gave a "cover open" error and if it didn't the printer gave a "paper jam JI" error which was false as well. After disconnecting the finisher the unit printed just fine. I tried reconnecting it without success so I left it disconnected for over an hour while printing other jobs. Then powered down, connected the finisher once more and the darn thing booted up normally. Go figure! Meanwhile I was going mental for 3 or 4 hours trying to figure it out making sure each photo-sensor was working in every door and flap. Countless reboots, shut downs, etc.

Overall we're still quite happy with the equipment but the Minolta tech service and billing leaves a bit to be desired.

Otherwise paper jam frequency is quite acceptable. One tip if you're printing tabloid one side colour, then running it through again for b&w on the other side (to save money) you'll get some paper jams because the page tends to curl a bit after the first colour (or b&w) pass. The solution is to print using paper drawer #2 instead of #1 because #2 has much larger, and flat paper guides.

Colour toner changes are quite easy to do.

Colour reproduction is still as good as the first page when it was new. We have a total count over 17,000 pages now (although that number is askew from tabloid/letter mis-count explained above). No visible banding, just nice solid colour. Contrast is slightly less than a true laser but the speed and even colour more than make up for it.

I have to say that the consumables service is quite efficient. If you order toner before 2pm it is delivered by courier the next day before 5pm. That has worked very nicely.

Other than that we discovered that when printing from any application if you select B&W instead of colour printing you will probably be billed for colour. You need to go into the Fiery printer settings and into the "colorwise" setting and choose "grayscale", or into the advanced printer settings and make sure the colour mode is "grayscale". Otherwise the printer driver sends a quasi-black document to the printer and it prints b&w using 4 colours and you'll be billed in colour. Unfortunately we learned the hard way after doing over 2000 tabloid pages in supposedly b&w and were billed in colour. Ouch! You would think that b&w chosen in the printer driver WOULD BE true b&w output and page count. So be wary of this issue.

Printing speed does slow down a bit with tabloid on duplex and folding/staple option. When printing a document of 9 tabloid pages b&w (for equivalent 18 letter size pages) folded and stapled takes about 1 minute per document from start to finish. Keep in mind the machine has to print each tabloid page duplex, stack them all up, staple, then fold. This brings me to another minor issue. If you want to print a large folded and stapled document and have the cover in colour, then print the rest in b&w you will need to be a bit creative. On a recent 20 letter size page document the front cover, 1st page, last page, back cover were one pdf document which I printed in colour and duplex. Next I printed page 3 to page 18 in "grayscale" b&w also duplex (booklet mode) with folding and stapling and you have to manually slide in the colour cover sheet you printed before hand. It's no big deal. As soon as you hear the stapler going then throw the colour cover into the finisher, the b&w pages will slide on top, then they all get folded and bound. This way you have a finished document with some colour enhancements but save huge costs on printing the interior of the document in true b&w.

Another tip when you're printing tons of folded and/or stapled documents is that the paper drawer below the finisher that catches folded and/or stapled stuff fills up with only a few documents done so you'll be running back and forth to the printer to empty it as the printer stops if it's full. The easy solution is to re-arrange the little paper lever on outside edge of the finisher paper drawer. Simply press the sides together and pull the arm away from the machine slightly (it's connected with a metal spring). Then rotate it to the upside-down position and once again push it back into the machine. It just snaps in easily. Now when you print, your finished documents will just slide off the finisher onto the floor or you can place a box next to it to catch them. No more running back and forth to empty the paper tray!

If you're printing duplex on a single 11x17 with folding only, such as a simple 4 letter size page brochure it will be quite slow because the finisher won't allow the printer to print another copy until it has folded the first one.

Otherwise, doing letter size prints is a blazing 31ppm. As with most printers, occasionally it will stop for a second or two to catch it's breath so-to-speak when printing large jobs. Overall speed is quite impressive.

June 9, 2003 We are very happy with the unit. Colour printing is super fast and brilliant. Very low occurance of paper jams. We've had 3 in around 9000+ prints of various stocks even difficult to handle glossy label material and duplexing. Noise-wise it's no louder than your average laser printer which is pretty good considering the size and performance of the machine. The Fiery print server RIPs jobs pretty quick and sending jobs over the network at 100mbits goes very quickly, makes the old QMS Magicolors look like turtles in every respect. 100+mb print file sizes are processed with ease usually printing in less than a minute after hitting the "print" button in your application software.

We did have a few minor issues with the setup of billing and ordering toner. Since we were the first to have the CF2002 "printer" version (without scanner unit) we went through some "teething" problems but everything is being sorted out slowly. The machine itself has performed as expected or better. Toner changes are a snap. Just open the front door, turn the lever down and pull the toner bottle out. Slide a new one in and lift up the lever again. Easy as 1-2-3.