It weighs ‘just’ 72.6 pounds which means holding it on a desk is simply out of a question and you’ll need several people pushing and pulling if you decide you want to move it to some other location. At the center of the printer you can find a two-line backlit screen that provides you with a simple and intuitive control menu, for when you need to navigate directly through the printer and not from your PC.

Just to the left of the output bin you’ll find a panel. Lifting the panel will uncover the toner cartridges. As you receive the Aficio CL3500N it will already contain a black and a color cartridge that will last for about 2500 pages. When the ink runs out you’ll replace them with high capacity cartridges that can work for printing around 6000-7000 pages.

The CL3500N Ricoh printer is one of the fastest in its range. This makes it an ideal candidate for people who get annoyed while waiting what seems to be ages for a page to print out, or for offices that have higher printing needs. If more users are connected to the same printer, that will obviously amount to a lot of documents that have to be processed on the same device. This is where speed is so important. A slow device might mean you’ll have to buy at least 2 for a busy office, or considerably slow down your operations.

Restocking your Aficio CL3500N with paper won’t slow you down either. The sheet capacity is satisfactory. The printer has a standard capacity of 630 sheets of paper and a maximum of 1690. Moreover, if you want, you can acquire a duplexer for it, which will make printing even faster and more convenient. As an average, the printer can work with about 16000 pages a month, but the manufacturer claims that you can even print up to 50000 pages in some month without risking damage or repair costs.

Now, one of the primary reasons for buying a color laser printer is print quality. The Ricoh Aficio CL3500N doesn’t do so well in this department. The quality is ok for what most businesses need (if you’re printing letters, documents, reports it’s not so important how sharp and crisp the font looks) but compared to other color laser printers it can be considered low. This is where the compromise was made. For printing large amounts of paper at a very high speed, some of the quality of the prints was lost. When deciding whether to equip your office with a Ricoh Aficio CL3500N you’ll have to straight up decide if it’s fast speeds you are interested in or if you value print quality more.