THE NEWS IN PRINT

We had inks for inkjet printers and also toners for laser printers, Ricoh wanted to try out a third alternative bridging the two; gel based printers. While the technology has a long way to go, Ricoh’s gel based printers seems to be an expensive affair.

Ricoh’s GX2500 was touted as an alternative to colour laser printers but as CA found out, it is no match to the tested solution in quality as well as economy.

The colour gel cartridge can print 1000 pages and is priced at £30 whereas colour toner for a laser cartridge costs £80 and can print around 4000 pages. Calculating per print cost, laser printers cost 2p per print while the technology meant for economical printing is at 3p per print. Clearly, Ricoh seems to have lost the plot with the economy of printing.

Major printing flaws were unearthed while printing text with images. Level Colour technology which ensures that colour gel used is minimal while printing images proved ineffective, as the text quality was found to be poor.

On the upside, although the photo print quality is poor, the speed of execution was quicker than most other printers.

Priced at £111, GX2500 is expensive and holds no race to other economical solutions available in the market. Replacement cartridges are no saints at £120. The bulky design at 13 kilos makes it highly unattractive for homes and small offices.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.