I recently bought a new Minolta QMS 2300dl a top-rated color laser printer. What sold me on this particular one was that for $800 street, it came with ethernet built in.
We’ve had bad luck with the last few generations of cheap laser and inkjet printers from HP and all three girls need new printers again. Buying one decent network printer for all three made sense since we were replacing two low-end but high volume color inkjets (kids homework), one low end laser (school board and education foundation) and one midrange photo printer (the annual christmas collage).
Based on how often we buy another case of paper at Costco, we print about 2500 pages per month. The cost of ink cartridges alone is crushing.
What’s Good:
- Best news is that I can’t tell the difference between a photograph printed on a HP 8550N Color Laserjet (the $6,000 color printer here at work) and the Minolta 2300DL at home.
- Installation on Windows 2000 and Windows 98 (most of the computers in the house) went without a hitch.
- The printer has a “power save” mode that basically shuts down everything but the network and a watchdog so it’s not got the whole marking engine running all the time.
- Each of the toner colors (black, cyan, magenta, yellow) are separately replaceable, as is the drum.
- The front panel LCD will tell you how much (0-100%) of each of the consumables is left
- Toner comes in low (1500 page) or high (4500 page) capacity cartridges, and the installed cartridges don’t all need to be the same capacity. So you can have one black high-capacity and the colors low-capacity.
What Sucks
- It’s not supported for Mac or Linux, which is a bummer. This is because it does not speak Postscript, PCL or any other “normal” marking language. Sigh.
- It’s noisy as can be. Perhaps the loudest printer I’ve ever owned. This is the Nikon F of printers.
- The marking engine draws an enormous amount of power. The manual says it sould be on it’s own circuit and they’re right. It dims the lights in the room (really!) when it prints.
- When I installed the drivers on an Windows XP machine, it spontaneously crashed/rebooted in the middle of the install (not at a proper point) and the Windows XP installation was so trashed that it was not recoverable. I did not call Minolta customer support and offer to trash my machine again so they could debug it.
Stupid Tricks
Like most network devices today, this little guy has web browser built in for simple configuration. What suprised me was that they did not also have a telnet-accessible CLI.
So, I tried to telnet to the printer anyway, and was suprised (only a little) to find myself in the VXWorks shell. No login required. Bang. Let every user debug the printer too!
[me@myhost ~]$ telnet 192.168.2.83 Trying 192.168.2.83... Connected to 192.168.2.83. Escape character is '^]'. -> help help Print this list dbgHelp Print debugger help info nfsHelp Print nfs help info netHelp Print network help info spyHelp Print task histogrammer help info timexHelp Print execution timer help info h [n] Print (or set) shell history i [task] Summary of tasks' TCBs ti task Complete info on TCB for task sp adr,args... Spawn a task, pri=100, opt=0, stk=20000 taskSpawn name,pri,opt,stk,adr,args... Spawn a task td task Delete a task ts task Suspend a task tr task Resume a task d [adr[,nunits[,width]]] Display memory m adr[,width] Modify memory mRegs [reg[,task]] Modify a task's registers interactively pc [task] Return task's program counter version Print VxWorks version info, and boot line Type to continue, Q to stop: 35f4f0 vxTaskEntry +5c : shell () 33d75c shell +180: 33d788 () 33d998 shell +3bc: execute () 33db18 execute +d4 : yyparse () 37d548 yyparse +798: 37bc18 () 37bd74 yystart +738: help () 30b0d0 help +88 : fioRdString () 3363f0 fioRdString +50 : read () 2f928c read +10 : iosRead () 2fa718 iosRead +cc : 37ffa4 () 37ffb4 ptyDevRemove +194: tyRead () 35b1d4 tyRead +44 : semTake () 31ed8c semTake +134: semBTake () tShell restarted. ->
