Konica QMS printers so secure, it's almost scary

YOU CAN CONSIDER this story a review published one year too late. Or a public service announcement. It's actually both. For the late review, read on. For the public service announcement, scroll down to the "So secure..." heading. And in case you're complaining already, hey, how many times do you read reviews that test a device for a year and then report back on the true quality of it, after twelve months of use, abuse and consumable refills?. That's why I'm sharing this one year long review with you.

Thanks to INQ paycheques, early last year I was able to buy myself something that was on my "want list" since I was around 15 years old and looked at the pages of the legendary Byte Magazine with the same fascination of people who look at a car wreck. That 'something' on my want list was... a colour laser printer.

Konica Minolta 2350 EN: a sturdy and ultra compatible colour laser printer

To make a long story short: I choose the Konica Minolta 2350EN, for these reasons:

• I wanted a true network printer, with all standard, open printing protocols. The 2350 EN supports PCL5, PCL6, and Colour PostScript (PS level 2).
• I wanted a printer which implemented as much as possible in hardware rather than software. This ruled out all "Win printers" and "GDI printers" which are inexpensive but sponsored and promoted by the Evil Empire of Redmondia exactly because they work fine as long as you pay your yearly Voleware tax and run the Windows flavour of the year.
• I wanted a colour laser which could be expanded with standard, inexpensive desktop PC memory. The 2350 EN comes with 128MB ram but a standard SDRAM DIMM socket (PC133) for additional expansion.
• I wanted a true laser, not a "LED Printer" - they're similar because both use toner, but the LED printers die sooner and in some instances replacement parts are more expensive. This ruled out the otherwise impressive Okidata 5xxx series.
• Since I'm a cheapskate, I wanted a printer that has third party, "bulk" colour toner widely available so I could do my own cartridge refills. Reverse engineering colour toner is much more complicated than producing inkjet inks, and companies like Faroudja, Static Control, Future Graphics, and others that deal with producing compatible toner usually come up with great toner formulations a long while after a given colour laser engine has entered the market. Well, there's no short supply of compatible bulk toner available for the QMS/Konica-Minolta 2350 EN series.
• I didn't want to mess with CHIPS, electronic counters and any other "countermeasures" on the toner cartridges that must be "reset" with special kit after a refill.
• I had enough with HP's popular yet sometimes cheaply designed printers. I made my mind after reading this horror story on the HP 2500 colour laser, which apparently increases the page count every time you open and close the lid, leading to a shorter image drum life, even when you print nothing.
• Refills should be painless: In this regard, the QMS/Konica-Minolta 2350 EN is a pleasure to deal with. Toner charge is indicated on each cartridge by a... tiny moving mechanical piece. Just remove a few screws, slide the piece back to the original position, and ... bingo... "cartridge full". And you don't have to break or drill the toner cartridge to refill it: just pop out a round plastic cap, refill with bulk toner, and re-insert the plastic cap. Gorgeous!.
• I don't print a high volume of colour prints, so any printer which gives me 4 pages per minute or more was enough for my work. The 2350EN's engine does 18 pages per minute in black, and 4 PPM in colour.
• The 2350 EN does 1200 dpi in PostScript mode and 9600 x 600 dpi in PCL.
• It has ethernet, usb and parallel links.
• It can accept an internal IDE hard disk for expansion (great). Needs a proprietary cable/daughterboard to connect it (bad).
• Quality bulk toner available on eBay. Suffice to say that for $120 I can have all four colours (cyan, yellow, magenta, black), while by purchasing new toner cartridges, I'd be paying the same amount per each colour. UK sellers also available.
• Upgradeable firmware
• Excellent web-based administration. It even collects statistics about per colour page coverage, toner use, remaining toner, page size stats, you name it.
• They have a local distributor who keep parts and do repairs locally, a great plus. Too bad that their site is a real pain, and that they don't read their (often bouncing) e-mail so you have to phone them to find out anything (rant).

PCL, colour postscript, internal HD option, ethernet, usb, parallel...

The 2350 EN is a toner refiller's dream

Before I continue, let me say that this printer originally came to life as the "QMS 2350 EN" and was introduced in 2003, but at two times its current retail price. I always heard good comments about QMS printers, starting around the mid-90s... QMS printers were always associated with almost "bullet-proof" hardware: solid and compatible with every operating system on Earth. QMS was later bought by Minolta, so the QMS printers line became "Minolta-QMS", and later Minolta's printer business was bought by Konica, so the printers are now known as "Konica Minolta", sadly dropping the QMS name altogether. Still, the QMS designs are so good that the firm keeps manufacturing them. I can't vouch for the quality of their latest printers, but these models based on original QMS designs are rock solid. Today, besides Amazon.com -where it's stocked intermittently, so you better check-, you can find this printer brand new between $550 and $650 greenbacks in the U.S.

Print quality is great, I had a single paper jam in about a year and ~1,500 page prints -which I was able to solve effortlessly. So if this article were a review, I'd have given this printer five Fernandos in my one-to-five personal rating scale. But it's not, so I won't say it.

So secure, you better not lose the password

All the long babbling above was just an introduction for the real story: I found out the hard way that QMS/KonicaMinolta laser printers are so secure, that you might need to exchange the controller circuit board if you happen to forget the password to the printer's web management interface and you have locked the front LCD panel as well, and for some reason the manufacturer can't provide you with a special magic password -or they do but it doesn't work-.

What is even more interesting, this printer sports a rotary system which means that there is one opening to remove a toner cartridge, and to remove each different colour you must select -with the front panel- which one do you want to replace, and the printer cycles through the cartridges until the right colour appears in the removal opening.

So here I was ready to do one of my cheap refills, and I... forgot the password. Yes, completely forgotten. Zero, nothing, nada. I had no clue of that very clever password I originally entered on the printer. And it was 14 chars long, to boot!. Knowing myself, I was a hundred percent sure it even included some numeric digits mixed in between. So I did what I do when I lose or forget the password to every other device: I tried to find the way to erase the whole device's configuration and restore everything to the factory defaults. So I looked in the user's manual. Then the installation manual. Nothing. Then digging on dark corners of the interweb I even found the maintenance manual. Nothing!.

So I decided to tear apart the printer, and look in the controller board. I was sure there would be a jumper, a circuit board short pad, something in there that would allow me to "RESET" the printer. There was, JP11... "RST" it looked like a reset jumper. I shorted it. The printer shut down. Great!. I said. Now I removed the jumper and expected to power cycle it, reconfigure the printer's IP address, reconfigure everything, and it would be back in business. No no. Everything was exactly as before.

So I decided to call the mothership, also known as QMS ^R^R^R Konica Minolta Tech Support:

"I lost the administration password. I need to reset the printer to all the factory defaults, INCLUDING the password. I tried shorting the RST jumper on the controller board but the password stays the same. Thanks"

One business day later, a reply from the mothership arrived: "From your email comments, I see that you would like to restore factory defaults and change the administrator password. Refer to this link for the information requested: http://onlinehelp.kmprinters.com/CPDocs/q0304001.htm

That link tells you how to reset everything, using the front LCD display and control panel. The problem, of course, was that the control panel access was password protected as well (this feature is user selectable for added security in corporate environments).

So I INQuired once again. The support fellow escalated the issue to a higher level boffin, which replied very politely and professionally -emphasis in the text below, mine-:

"I am emailing you regarding an issue you are having with your magicolor 2350 laser printer. It is my understanding that you are trying to reset an admin password on your printer. We _MAY_ be able to help, but *I can't guarantee anything*. Password security on our printers is meant to be just that, secure, and are *not meant to be easily reset*. I have a password generator at my disposal that may be able to generate a password that can override the current one, but I will need some information from your printer first. To generate the password I need to have the serial number (which we already have) and the number of faces printed on the printer. You can find out the number of faces printed either by checking the startup page (prints out when the printer is turned on, unless it has been disabled) or by the printers built-in web page". (...) "If we are unable to get the number of faces printed due to the startup page being disabled or inability to access the web page, we will not be able to generate a password for you.

No jumper fiddling or internal trick to erase all config to factory defaults. Just the mothership's custom-generated "magic password"

Jaw dropped, horror in my face. I looked at the circuit board once again... all surface mount components... no EEPROM to remove, erase, and re-insert. A truly SECURE design. Too secure for my taste!. How nice it is to depend on the availability or reach ability of the manufacturer (pray the manufacturer never decides to stop supporting that model!) in order to erase all configuration and reset the device to its factory defaults? But the message continued:

"Once I get the number of faces printed from you I will attempt to generate a password and email it back to you. If the new password doesn't work there won't be any other way of resetting that password and the admin features of the printer will remain locked unless the password is remembered or found".

Of course, on this printer "the printer will remain locked" means also "you will be unable to exchange toner cartridges" because, as I told you, the only way to cycle between toner cartridges so the right one can be extracted from the single opening, is by using the front panel, which was -yes- locked.

So I gathered the "page count" data, e-mailed it to the Konica Minolta tech support HQ in Mobile, Alabama, and lighted a candle to Saint IGNUcius, saint patron of Free Software, the uphill battles, and all other noble but somewhat lost causes.

The replied arrived three days later (my reply was sent late Friday):

The temporary master password we generated based on the supplied page count information is
cqa453s1cd9c6106

Enter this when prompted for a password on the front panel of the printer (it is case sensitive). If the counts are correct and this still doesn't work, the only way to regain administrative control of that printer will be to **replace the controller board**.

I nervously typed the given "magic password" and... I was in!. Finally. Thanks to Konica's tech support. Thanks to Saint IGNUcius!. So now you know. QMS / KonicaMinolta laser printers are really secure. So secure that there's no way the end user can reset it to factory defaults without a "magic password generator" kept very securely in the hands of boffins at the Mothership called KonicaMinoltaQMS. Keep that in mind when choosing your printer password. And if you have employees in charge of your QMS/KonicaMinolta printers, make them store the passwords safely. You really don't want a dozen or more expensive printers turned into paperweights overnight just because you let go the only guy who knew the passwords, who incidentally moved to Australia to work as a kangaroo trainer. And you can't even change toner cartridges without the printer's password!. Even if you count on the "mothership" at Konica being always available, keep in mind I lost access to my printer -and the ability to refill toner as well- for about five days. Not nice, indeed.

Me? I'm now *very* happy with my 2350 EN printer, and I'd certainly consider buying one of the newer models from Konica if need ever arises. But when it comes to passwords, I now know that one better remember them. So from now on, my QMS printer password is simple: DONTFOGGEDIT. µ