Product Reviews

Ricoh's bulky, dated-looking Aficio GX2500 is the latest printer to use the company's GelSprinter ink technology. It's an alternative to traditional inkjets and uses gel-based ink. GelSprinter printers claim to have several advantages over inkjet printers: faster print speeds, shorter drying times and better sunlight and water resistance. Ricoh also claims that they're more economical to run.

We've previously found GelSprinter-based printers to have poor print quality and expensive consumables, so were interested to find out whether the GX2500 could impress us. It's bulky for an inkjet, weighing in at 13kg and measuring 416x440x249mm. However, to compare the GX2500 to a home-oriented photo inkjet would be a mistake: this is an out-and-out business printer. The figures make this abundantly clear: a 250-sheet paper tray and a 6,000-sheet monthly duty cycle. You certainly won't find any memory card readers or colour screens here - just a mono screen for making basic menu settings.

Slots for the four gel cartridges are hidden behind a flap at the front of the printer. Setup instructions were easy to follow and the driver was quick to install. After installing the ink cartridges, we had to wait five minutes for ink to be loaded into the machine.

Print-head alignment is necessary to ensure the best results from the GX2500, but it isn't made easy. The instructions in both the alignment utility and the user guide are obscure and badly written, although the print-head alignment process itself is quick, requiring you to print just a single page.

Print speeds were quick, thanks to

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an extra-wide print head for printing more lines at once and a belt transfer system instead of traditional rollers. However, normal-quality mono text prints appeared at 9.8ppm - a good result, but not as fast as we've seen from some inkjets. Speed appears to have come by compromising quality. Even at full quality, text looked slightly fuzzy and became more so at normal and draft settings.

Colour print speeds of 6.9ppm would have been impressive if the print quality weren't so poor, with broken, poorly defined lettering. The same document was much more readable at the highest quality setting, but printed more slowly at 3.8ppm.

The GX2500 can print at photo quality if you select the highest quality and glossy paper settings. Unfortunately, we had to wait over seven-and-a-half minutes for two 10x8in prints and quality was poor on generic A4 photo paper. Bright colours appeared faded, pale tones looked pink and we could see marks left by the print head. The printer can't print on 6x4in paper, even using the custom paper size settings.

Ricoh claims that colour prints can be made at a similar cost to mono, but this presumably applies only under some very specific and unusual circumstances. By our calculations, a mono page at five per cent coverage costs 1.8p, while full colour costs 9.9p. That's a total of 11.7p for a page of mixed colour and black printing, far more expensive than any inkjet or laser printer we've seen recently, and more expensive than entry-level colour lasers.

Consumables are expensive but have a high capacity, so you shouldn't have to buy them too often. According to the GX2500's ink monitors, the cartridges that come with it are only half full.

With GelSprinter, Ricoh has attempted to provide laser speeds and inkjet affordability, but the GX2500 fails on both counts. It also lacks a network interface, so isn't much good for workgroup use.

If you want fast, economical colour prints you'd be better off with the similarly priced TallyGenicom 8108N, which also has a network interface as standard. Alternatively, the more expensive HP Colour LaserJet 3600 will be cheaper in the long run as its running costs are significantly lower.