http://www.ComputerBob.com/reviews/review_minolta_printer.php .
.
.
by ComputerBob
February 16, 2001
Disclosure: I don't work for the Minolta/QMS company or have any ties to the Minolta/QMS company at all, except for the fact that they sent me a PagePro 1100L printer to try out in December, 2000. After using it for a couple of months, I returned the printer to Minolta/QMS in February, 2001.
I remember when laser printers took up half the size of a normal desk, weighed a ton, printed 4 pages per minute at 300 dots per inch, and cost over $4,000. It was big news when the first under-$3,000 laser printer came out. Boy, have things changed. The Minolta-QMS PagePro 1100L laser printer takes up about the same amount of desk space as an inkjet printer, weighs less than sixteen pounds, prints nearly 10 pages per minute at 600 dots per inch, and retails for only $279. At the time of this writing, a search on MySimon.com and ComputerShopper.com showed its street price to be between $188.88 and $257.36 (plus shipping and applicable tax). Another search of those sources turned up laser printers with similar features in the same price range from competitors Brother, NEC, Okidata, Samsung, Panasonic and Xerox. Minolta's target audience for the 1100L is SOHO (small office/home office) users. The photo below shows printed pages in the optional face-up output tray. Without that tray, printouts are delivered face-down in the included clear output tray on the top of the printer.
| Feature | PagePro 1100L | PagePro 1100 |
|---|---|---|
| Type of Printer | Monchrome laser | Monchrome laser |
| Print Speed | 10 pages per minute | 10 pages per minute |
| Resolution | 600dpi x 600dpi | 1200dpi x 600dpi |
| RAM Memory | 4MB | 4MB |
| Max. RAM Memory | 4MB | 132MB |
| Processor | Mitsubishi M3807 | PowerPC 75 MHz |
| Page Size | 8.5" x 14" | 8.5" x 14" |
| Paper Input | 150 sheets | 150 sheets |
| Max. Paper Input | 650 sheets (optional, $149) | 650 sheets (optional $149) |
| Paper Output | Face-down | Face-down |
| Optional Paper Output | Face-up ($19) | Face-up ($19) |
| Compatibility | Windows 95/98Windows NT 4.0/5.0 | PCL6 |
| Interface | Parallel only | Parallel, Optional Ethernet |
| 10/100BaseT Ethernet | No | Optional, $299 |
| Retail Price | $279 | $399 |
The review unit that was shipped to me appeared to be a normal consumer-packed unit. It arrived in a cardboard box, with the printer cradled within styrofoam inserts, and the documentation sealed in plastic bags. The clear documentation in the User's Guide made it easy to unpack the printer and remove the various spacers that are inserted into it to protect it during shipping. It came with its toner cartridge and print drum already installed. It took only a few minutes to install the appropriate printer driver software from the included CD onto my Pentium II - 266Mhz PC, running Wndows 98 SE.
The 1100L requires an IEEE 1284 type-B cable to connect it to your PC's parallel port. Many other printer manufacturers include an IEEE cable with their printers, but the 1100L does not come with one. Minolta-QMS should include the required printer cable with the 1100L, to prevent frustrated printer buyers from having to make a trip to a computer store to buy a printer cable right in the middle of setting up their printer. Minolta-QMS does not offer a way to connect the 1100L to a network, a downside for a printer that is aimed at the SOHO market. Those who need a networked printer may want to consider the PagePro 1100 (see table above) which does offer optional ethernet connectivity.
The 1100L is designed to print from a Windows 95/98 or Windows NT 4.0/5.0 PC. It cannot print from a Macintosh, a Linux computer, or a computer running any other operating system. Its sibling, the PagePro 1100 uses the standard PCL6 commands used by most industry-standard Hewlett-Packard printers.
Less than 10 minutes after I first opened its cardboard box, I was printing twelve 5-page syllabi from some of the courses I teach. Other than connecting the printer cable and then installing the printer driver from the CD, I didn't have to set up or configure anything.
The 1100L appears to be well-designed and well-built, without any loose
pieces or ill-fitting parts. Pressing one button on its side opens the
top of the printer, and it 
is
a simple, one-hand operation to remove both the toner cartridge and
print drum. The input paper tray (shown in its folded-up position in
the photo) folds down and sticks out the front of the printer, where
it holds up to 150 sheets of paper. The 1100L would be more appropriate
for SOHO use if its default input tray held a lot more paper. As it
is, one has to either buy the optional 500 sheet input tray or constantly
fill its relatively tiny default paper tray. Another complaint about
the 1100L's paper handling is that input paper can easily get out of
alignment because the only two side paper guides are right where the
paper enters the printer, allowing the outside ends of the paper to
shift sideways -- paper handling would be a lot more trouble-free if
there were paper guides out at the end of the paper tray to hold the
stack of input paper securely. I was able to print over 500 pages on
the 1100L without any paper jams or misaligned pages, but that is possibly
only because I took the time to manually realign the input paper before
each print job. One good point is that Minolta-QMS rates the 1100L as
being able to print 15,000 pages per month, which is far more than what
most small businesses would need to print. Oddly, the 1100L gave
off a very strong chemical smell the first several times I used it.
Over a period of several weeks, the smell faded a little, but even after
more than 2 months of daily use, it was still strong enough that I could
smell it every time I printed something, even though the printer sat
on a table about 6 feet from my desk.
The 1100L's print quality and print speed were both excellent for such an inexpensive printer. I printed hundreds of pages of text from Microsoft Word 2000 and from Web pages, along with hundreds of graphics from Microsoft Image Composer, Presto Page Manager, and Web pages. Every page came out very quickly and perfectly, with sharp black letters and evenly-spaced grayscale dots in the graphics. Even the tiniest size text was just as sharp and black as normal-sized text. After only a couple of seconds warm-up time, the 1100L printed at closer to 9 pages per minute than the manufacturer's claimed 10 pages per minute, but even 9 pages per minute is still more than fast enough for SOHO use. One complaint I have about the 1100L's printing is that every time I printed a multiple-page document, my computer's cursor froze for 2 seconds every 7 seconds or so, each time a new page was sent to the printer, constantly interrupting me from doing other tasks on my PC while printing. I searched the Minolta-QMS Web site for a solution and experimented with some of the settings in the 1100's printer driver, but I was unable to solve that annoying cursor freezing problem. Since my PC uses a Pentium II - 266Mhz, I guess that the cursor freezing problem was not my PC's fault, but may have been due to a printer driver glitch or the fact that the 1100L doesn't have enough RAM memory to accept a multi-page print job from the PC all at once. Unfortunately, the 1100L's 4MB of RAM is not upgradeable, unlike its sibling model 1100.
Like most computer technologies, laser printers just keep getting better,
faster and cheaper. Users now have several choices of fast, high-quality
laser printers for under $250, so they should find out everything they
can about those choices before deciding which of those choices would
be best for their particular situation and budget. Even though it is
not perfect, the Minolta-QMS 1100L laser printer could be an excellent
choice for a SOHO setting that has only non-networked Windows PCs, a
SOHO setting that has a local area network that uses Windows' printer
sharing, or an individual who's looking for excellent print quality
and speed at a relatively low price.