Ricoh Aficio SP C420DN - printer - color - laser

9/10 Amazing (albiet BIG) Color Laser Printer!

gmoore10 - 05/08/09  (Edited: 05/08/09)

The Ricoh Aficio SP C420DN is an excellent all-around color laser printer.

Feature-wise, it comes with 3 different sets of drivers. PCL 6, PS, and Ricoh's custom RPCS driver.

Initially I thought the PS driver was the best, but after a vast amount of tinkering, I found that Ricoh's custom drivers have far more power and features than PostScript drivers do.

This printer is capable of printing on cardstock up to 216gsm and, while not thick enough for my applications, it could still be useful for others.

The printer has duplexing built-in and can handle over 2,000 sheets of paper when you install additional paper trays (only caveat is cost... each paper tray is almost half the cost of the printer!).

The printer has a very large LCD display (large for a printer, anyway) and large buttons and labels.

Unfortunately, the printer only comes with starter-toners which I ran through in less than a month (3,000 pages per cartridge). However, the High Yield toner cartridges are incredibly inexpensive and yield 15,000 pages. Cost per page for B&W is roughly half a cent per page at 5% coverage and CPP for color is a hair over 5 cents per page, replacement imaging units included.

The printer is very fast and efficient at 600x600 DPI, but slows down a bit with 1200x1200 DPI printing.

Combine this printer with Hammermill Color Laser photo paper, and you can print some truly excellent looking pictures and layouts.

A few minor downsides though: Ricoh doesn't offer this printer in any sort of MFP model. The older C400DN does have the added option of an ADF/Flatbed scanner, but it's very expensive.

Sometimes this printer doesn't line up colors very well, even after using the "Color Registration" feature on the printer itself. This can usually be corrected within the driver settings though.

The printer is absolutely huge. It's the biggest desktop laser printer I've ever used and weighs in at 110lbs (The manual strongly recommends 4 people to lift the unit).

Initial cost is quite high, especially if you need extra paper trays, but the offset is the ridiculously cheap toner ($89 for 15,000 pages of black!) as well as low maintenance.

Ricoh's paper tray labels are completely wrong (it looks like someone rendered the paper tray graphic backwards... implying that the paper is picked up at the back of the printer instead of the front, which isn't the case) so you may want to re-label your paper tray. Weird.

Overall an excellent desktop printer.

If you need press-match quality, I'd look somewhere else, although if you needed that, you're probably not looking at desktop printers anyways...