Product Reviews

Ricoh's Aficio GX3000 is a heavy-duty colour inkjet, designed for office and home office use. It has a built-in duplexer for automatic double-sided printing. Rather than printing with a dye- or pigment-based ink, the GX3000 uses liquid gel, which Ricoh says is waterproof, sunlight-resistant and quick to dry.

The GX3000 certainly doesn't look much like a home printer. It's large for an inkjet, and heavy at 14kg. It's made from two equally unappealing shades of grey plastic. The printer's slide-out paper tray is easy to load and can hold 250 sheets of plain paper, more than some affordable colour lasers, including Samsung's CLP-300, reviewed opposite. At 150 sheets, the output tray is suited to long, unattended print jobs.

The printer uses four gel cartridges that are easily fitted in a compartment at the front. Gel is carried to permanent print heads via capillary tubes. The priming process takes several minutes during the initial setup, but can also be slow after the printer has been switched off overnight, or after each change

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of cartridge. However, you shouldn't find yourself fitting new supplies too often. Each colour cartridge should last for 1,000 pages, while black supplies are rated for 1,500. Though the yields are higher than for a typical home inkjet, the cartridges are quite expensive, and the GX3000 has high colour running costs.

By default, the GX3000 reversed the page order of printed documents, which is a common inkjet irritation. Other than this, it completed our timed tests with little fuss. It was extremely quick to produce draft-quality text and graphics, reaching the highest speed we've seen from an inkjet on both our Draft and Normal Speed tests. Print quality was acceptible, but text outlines were a little shabby even at the Quality Priority setting, which was very disappointing.

Inkjet printers are often quite slow when duplex printing, as the printer must wait for the first pass to dry before re-feeding the paper to print the other side. The GX3000, however, printed our 50-page duplex test in just three minutes and eight seconds, the fastest result we've seen from an inkjet and much closer to laser speed. Unlike duplex-capable Canon PIXMAs that we've reviewed, such as the MP600 in our MFP Labs review on page 108, the GX3000's duplex prints matched the quality of its single-sided output.

The GX3000 is remarkably fast for an inkjet and also robust, with a 10,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle. The cheap price and fast printing might make this seem like an attractive office or workgroup printer, but the high cost of colour prints and low-quality output mean you're better off with a budget colour laser.