RICOH GX 3050 ???

[ffutures]

As my old laser gets more and more tired I'm incereasingly thinking in terms of replacing it with something else. I don't usually do vast quantities but there are occasional big runs e.g. 100+ sheets of disk labels.

The bottom line is that I need good mono and preferably colour, duplexing would be very useful, and preferably not incredibly expensive to run.

The one I keep coming back to is the RICOH GX 3050 "gelsprinter," which is a network printer with duplex and goes for around 60 quid plus postage. It's an inkjet but the ink is allegedly quick drying and relatively cheap. There appear to be Mac and Linux drivers for it.

Anyone got any reasonable hands-on experience (and not just seen a review, I want to know the real dirt...)?

There's no great urgency, the laser is still fine for mono - what I may do is buy something else for colour, e.g. the Ricoh, and keep the laser as my workhorse for text and drafts.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit dubious about the wax ones because there's only one source for consumables AFAIK.

The Dell is around cheaper than that (see e.g. Morgan who give you two sets of toners for about the same price), but I really would like duplex, it's been very useful. Unfortunately the duplex kit cost more than the printer when I checked it out!

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

I have an older version of the Xerox color printer with the "solid ink" technology. It is fine in a busy office environment, but bad for occasional spot printing because it has to melt the crayons every time you warm it up, which ends up leaving most of your solid ink in a black wax you have to throw out. I had a bunch at an old job. You can get third party ink for them.

The color on the Dell color printers is not good. It is fine for "office" printing, where you're just doing charts or bars of color. It is very poor at reproducing color images. We have one at work, and it gets very little use.

Having said that, I completely agree with nojay's assessment. You're better off getting a color laser if you're going to do any kind of volume. They're more reliable and cheaper on a per-page basis. One of the downsides if you're making game components is that the laser toner and/or solid ink doesn't soak into the page: it melts onto it. That means it'll scuff off with heavy use. With a good inkjet, the paper actually soaks up the ink which reduces scuffing from continual use (like cards or handouts that get a lot of handling).

I've never had a bad experience with HPs or Canons, and I've used many models from both extensively. I still use my LaserJet 4050N, which is rock-solid and still works great after many many years, including the abuse of hauling it around to conventions.

I was scarred by a long, horrific experience with a Ricoh color laser printer so I would never, ever buy one. I do have a Ricoh tabloid printer (mono laser) that works, but is a bear to deal with and has very flimsy components. I can't recommend it.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

More on Dell: the build quality on them isn't great. They seem to break down much more quickly than other printers we have, and they're very, very noisy on their way to the graveyard. I haven't had one make it to 20k pages before I had to replace a part. We haven't had any trouble with the duplexers, though. Really, only the Ricohs seemed to have duplexer trouble. Every single one I've had to deal with had frequent duplexer jams.