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I occasionally need double-sided colour printing; while lasers can't match the best inkjets for photographic work, they're excellent for the sort of mixed text and graphics work I do, and have the advantage of not drying out if they aren't used regularly. The SPC240DN is good all-round colour printer for a small office or business; it's not incredibly fast compared to the best high-speed colour lasers, but you're paying well under a hundred quid for performance that would have cost over a thousand not long ago. Even at full price this was very cheap for a colour laser; the current price makes it an incredible bargain, and built-in duplex is a huge plus. The hardest thing about installing it turned out to be getting the box upstairs and getting the printer unpacked and moved to its working position - it's big and weighs 29kg packed, about 70lb. Get help, or do it slowly and carefully. The first thing I noticed when setting it up is that it comes almost ready to use out of the box - since the cartridges contain drum and toner there is no separate drum or transfer belt, and the mechanism is much simpler than earlier models. To get it ready you simply take out a few transit tapes and tags, give the cartridges a bit of a shake, and plug it in. I got it done in about fifteen minutes. Network configuration is also easy - the only complication was that I needed to manually set the IP address so that my Mac laptop could find it easily. The menu for that is unusually simple, and it worked first time. If I hadn't needed that, I wouldn't have needed to access the printer menus at all. Software installation is simple for Windows PCs - just run the install disk, it automatically finds the printer on a network and sets up for it, and is ready about a minute later. The Mac install was, as usual, a bit of a pain - but I use an elderly iBook, it's entirely possible the newer Macs will have fewer problems. Once I got the printer and laptop talking it worked well. Note: this problem has gone completely in OS X Yosemite. From pressing print to first colour page out when it's on standby takes about 55 seconds - first page out when it's awake takes 24, but subsequent pages are much faster - about three seconds for mono, a little slower for colour. Duplex also slows things down, adding a few seconds per size. This isn't incredibly fast, but it's comparable with many other colour lasers. Toner is initially supplied in 1000-page cartridges; Ricoh's replacement cartridges are 2000 page but very expensive, each costing nearly as much as the printer. Unlike some other manufacturers, there isn't an oversized black cartridge available. Fortunately the cartridges can be refilled, and several vendors offer kits that include toner and a reset chip at about £15 per colour. Apart from that, there are a couple of small niggles, things that could have been done better; most notably, the input bypass is a slot, and only takes one sheet at a time - not ideal if you want to print several sheets on special paper or card. While the printer has PictBridge photo printing it's fairly slow; card slots and a proper built-in photo printing system would have been better. It took Ricoh nearly two years to add support for their printer in their iPad app, but it is now very good. These niggles apart, it's an excellent printer and built like a tank, and looks like it will be a good fit to my work. I recommend it Update - this is still working well at the end of 2016, but my experience with refilling black cartridges has been disappointing, they usually give problems fairly soon after refilling. Fortunately cartridges are still available and reasonably priced. Another problem is that even if you only print monochrome the colour toner is gradually used up - apparently a little gets wasted during every cleaner cycle. If you're doing a reasonable amount of colour printing this isn't a problem, but I happened to go several months without needing to print colour, at the end of that time all of the colour cartridges were notably depleted. It may be possible to get more life out of them by replacing the chips without refilling them, I haven't tried it yet.Read full review
I cannot remember ever buying a printer, let alone a laser printer, as easy to set up as this. Ten minutes after opening the box, the first perfect double sided print, on copier card, emerged from the machine. Of course, the cost of replacement toner carts mean that it's cheaper to just buy another printer in a few months but for what this baby cost, that's not a problem.
oh its a sheer delight to own a printer that when you press print it works!!!! fast, clear prints, no jamming, wonderful, highly recommended.
Excellent choice. Works perfectly. The colour is sharp and precise and the printer itself works fast. Very pleased indeed.
I have yet to find a printer (especially in this price range) which can even come close to competing with this one in terms of quality of output and value for money. Even when you print on the plainest, cheapest of papers you get a lovely hard copy - certainly good enough to rival what any inkjet can put on to any of those ridiculously expensive gloss papers and the like. PLUS! When you print out to paper with this machine you can then get in to transferring your masterpieces to sheets of wood. If you grab some mod podge, check out a few YouTube videos and see how other people do it, you can easily transfer paper prints to rough old wood to achieve some brilliant effects! So yeah. This is my personal printer of choice. Give it a try, if you can, especially if you want to expand your DIY skills to transferring paper prints on to other media. You won't be sorry :o)Read full review
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