Konica Minolta magicolor 1690MF Multifunction Printer

On the positive side, it prints very quickly in black, a little slower in color (it's a four-pass CMYK printer, meaning it prints Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black in individual runs or passes) but the quality of the color images are fantastic and are only limited by the quality of paper used. It scans acceptably well, not spectacular, but more than well enough for my needs. Haven't tried the fax portion and don't foresee doing so.

There are only two negatives that I've found: the machine is noisy even when not in use; it has a loud cooling fan that will run for a long time (more than 20 minutes); and it's shipped with what seems like only a few drops of black toner. If you buy this printer and plan to do any amount of printing right away, you need to get more black toner, pronto. The toner cartridge that came with it lasted less than a week with moderate usage.

So far I like it and would recommend it. The printer part of it gets five stars, the scanner four...Read more

We use this printer in our little design office, to supplement the ultra-high-quality (and ultra slow and expensive) prints from our ink-jet printer. I bought this printer to offer speed and economy for daily printing. The prints are surprisingly good, and fast enough to be a welcome relief from that ink-jet printer!

There is a bit of fan noise at times, and scanning over the network can be a little slow at the higher resolutions. But overall we are extremely happy with the printer. We've been cranking out full color prints of renderings and drawings, and there are no signs that we are running out of toner. We still don't use if for our final, photographic-quality high-gloss presentations, but we use if for all our daily stuff and interim client reviews.

I've had this printer for several months and would overall rate it as mediocre, but the base machine now sells for ~$250 online so you get what you pay for. Compared to prior Brother lasers, the KM is very noisy, slow, counter-intuitive to set up, crippled in a Mac OS 10.6 environment, and has largely dismal support online and by phone. So, be certain you're willing to accept these trade-offs in return for decent color prints, adequate scans, and OK faxes. Otherwise, pay a few hundred dollars more for a more user-friendly machine.

As others have noted, a set of OEM toner replacements costs more than the entire printer, so this is the Gillette model: give away the razors but make your profit on the supplies. Refilled toner cartridges are about half the cost of OEM and available online; refill kits, if you want to put up with the mess, could drop the costs further. One particularly annoying feature is that it's virtually impossible to cancel a print job using the...Read more