The small office life is tough at times and pleasant at times. Because small businesses are so small, that means few people have to handle several responsabilities. It also means that you'll equip the office with most likely only one printer that will work for the whole group of people. This is why it's so important to chose a reliable printer that can offer every single thing you need.



There won't be any 'hey Bob, use the printer in the next office because this one is broken down'. Because there won't be any printer in the other office. Ricoh specializes in exactly this type of device. While Ricoh printers aren't the top of the line when it comes to design or size, they generally are robust, reliable and capable.



A good choice for equipping your small office is the Ricoh AC205 printer. Right out of the box you'll be getting digital copying, printing, scanning, faxing as well as networking capabilities. The AC205 uses an all-in-one toner cartridge design. The black and white printing is supposed to be 22 pages per minute and the digital copying is done at the same speed. Since it offers a duplex, you'll also be able to save on paper by printing on both sides of the sheet while copying.

What seems to be a major inconvenient most of the time is how slow the printer switches from standby and warms up. Although the actual printing speed is indeed fast, it proves to be more than annoying to wait for the device to warm up before it starts printing, if you're not having a very busy day and it does end up entering standby constantly. In fact, the warm up time is actually much higher than the actual printing time.

The Ricoh AC205 printer supports a wide variety of media including labels, envelopes, transparencies or card stock. Copying quality is ok, but printing quality is not so great. Think of this as the fast printing and copying machine that can handle large amounts of paper in a short period of time, but won't exactly throw out state of the art presentation documents.



For the money you're paying, you'll get several advanced features. These features include printing documents straight from an USB flash drive, scan directly to USB flash or scan to e-mail. You won't need to use these on a daily basis but it's sometimes really handy to have them. After setting it up to work for all computers in your office, it should handle the printing needs of all the users with no problems at all. The maximum 550 sheet capacity means you'll have to remember to change the paper in it decently often if your printing needs are high. The printer settings utility software that it comes with will allow the user to program fax features (like phone book entries) straight from the PC. Super G3 33.6kb faxing works at a 3 second per page transmission speed and should be satisfying for most users.