Ricoh Aficio SP 4100N Mono Laser Printer
In departmental office environments one of the key
requirements is print speed and as printer makers know this it’s one of
the main features determining price. As the throughput speed increases
the price goes up steeply. Ricoh’s Aficio SP 4100N is a large workgroup
or small departmental mono laser with a claimed speed of 31ppm.
The printer has a fairly conventional layout with a large, 500-sheet
paper tray at the bottom and a further, 100-sheet multipurpose tray
which unclips and folds down from the front panel above. You have to
know just where to press it, though, as the click-open, click-closed
catch doesn’t respond unless you press directly over it.
The printer’s control panel is remarkably easy to use, as its eight
buttons are well labelled in English, rather than relying on sometimes
obscure icons and the two-line LCD display is completely horizontal and
has a good backlight.
The printer comes with USB and 10/100 Ethernet as standard interfaces
and you can add Gigabit networking and Wi-Fi as options. It's a bit
surprising that duplex printing isn't included as standard on a machine
at this price, but a duplexer is an option, along with two more
500-sheet paper trays, an envelope feeder, a hard drive and extra
memory.
A single-piece drum and toner cartridge slides in from the front, once
the front panel has been folded down. You shouldn't have to do this
often, though, as the standard capacity of the cartridge is 15,000
pages. The maintenance kit, which is needed every 90,000 pages, is the
only other consumable.
Software installation is reasonably straightforward, though choosing
Quick Install only sets up the PCL 6 driver and the Adobe Postscript
Level 3 installation is more fiddly, requiring you to assign a port
manually. Since Postscript and PDF support are two important features of
the printer, you'd think the driver installation would be included in
the Quick Install Wizard.
The driver itself includes support for up to 16 pages per sheet,
watermarks and user code entry, so only those with valid authority can
print to the machine. There's no facility for walk-up printing from a
USB stick, though, which is becoming an increasingly common feature.
Ricoh Aficio SP 4100N Mono Laser Printer - Ricoh Aficio SP 4100N Mono Laser Printer
Ricoh rates the Aficio SP 4100N at 31ppm, which is a very
respectable speed for a mid-range business laser. In our tests we saw
our five-page text print complete in 18 seconds and the five-page text
and graphics print in 15 seconds. This gives a top speed for small
documents of around 20ppm, though this excludes a five second wake-up
time, if the printer is in Energy Save Mode.
Increasing the print run to 20 pages gives a time of 48 seconds, or
25ppm, so the printer gets quite close to the manufacturer’s specified
speed. Printing our photo sample took just 10 seconds, but the quality
of the print, even at the machine's maximum resolution of 1200 x 600dpi,
wasn't good.
A lot of the greyscale detail was lost, with many of the darker tones
veering to black and obvious micro-banding showing in areas of sky.
There was also a paler, vertical band through the image and the
machine's ability to reproduce photos is called into question.
Business graphics also suffered from the micro-banding and some
greyscale tones again reproduced too darkly. Straight black text was
fine, with clean characters and smooth curves and diagonals, but if a
£400 mono laser printer couldn't produce good black text, it really
would have problems.
Ricoh doesn't quote noise level in its spec sheet, or another useful
parameter like duty cycle, but we measured it at peaks of 62dBA, which
is quite loud, but no worse than many office photo copiers.
The two consumables for the Aficio SP 4100N are the drum and toner
cartridge and the maintenance kit. Neither is cheap, but both have high
capacities, giving a cost per page of 1.99p, including 0.7p for plain
paper. This print cost is slightly on the high side, around 0.2p per
sheet more than competitors we’ve tested recently.
The high capacities of both the cartridge and maintenance kit mean
service costs should be low, but in this price bracket, the difference
between replacing consumables every 8,000 or every 15,000 pages aren’t
deal breakers.
Verdict
There are plus points in the make-up of Ricoh’s Aficio SP 4100N, like
its respectable speed, built-in Adobe PostScript and PDF interpreters
and the high capacity of its consumables. However, the poor print
quality, for anything other than black text, ranks against this and the
printer’s not particularly cheap or feature rich. Functions such as
walk-up printing can add a lot to the value for a printer being shared
in a workgroup or department and when you can get them for the same
price as this Ricoh machine, it moves it down the shortlist
.
Ricoh Aficio SP 4100N Mono Laser Printer - Feature Table
