Laser printers are renown for their truly affordable cost per printed page, inkjet printers not so much. Still Ricoh’s GX5050 printer comes pretty close to a laser one when it comes to printing costs. This all happens because of Ricoh’s remarkable Gelsprinter viscous ink technology. For short, the technology allows the printing of crisp, quality images for a pretty affordable price. Because of this, Ricoh’s whole Aficio printer series uses viscous ink as well as wide print heads.

Another way of keeping the costs low is equipping the printer with individual color cartridges. This is meant to maximize the ink use. The ink will have completely run out before you actually need to replace it and you can replace one ink cartridge at a time, instead of all at once.

When buying a printer, each user is well aware that there’s no getting all qualities and no down sides, hence, each and every one of us learns to prioritize. Priorities for small offices include fast printing speeds, optimization of space, keeping printing relatively affordable (since there will be huge quantities of documents to print in any given month). A device that offers copying, printing, scanning and fax all in one is also preferred. There really is no genuine interest in capabilities such as photo printing quality and while most inkjets nowadays are all-in-one and at least offer enough versatility, they also require frequent change of cartridges and don’t provide big enough paper feeders.

Ricoh’s specialty is to offer exactly the kind of device that can cater to the needs of an office environment. With the Aficio GX 5050 they promise the user a low cost of ownership and color printing that’s just and cheap and convenient as black and white printing. Moreover, the printer provides you with excellent network capabilities, is easy to set up and maintain. Printing speeds won’t disappoint even in a bigger workgroup. The manufacturer claims that it does up to 30 pages per minute, for either black or color printing, in continuous print mode. So if it comes down to either costs or speed, both black and white and color printing are just as convenient. Moreover, the prints it produces are ultra quick drying, water proof as well as sunlight resistant. Ports on the device include the standard USB and Ethernet 10 base -t/100 base TX. As for paper input capacity, it comes with a standard 250 sheep paper feed unit (maximum of 850 sheets) while the paper output capacity is of 150 sheets.

Truth be told, the Ricoh GX 5050 printer doesn’t offer anything remarkable in a world where technologic evolution is all about big bright LCD screens and sleek and glossy designs. But it was conceived to be an office power horse, that gets things done fast, with the lowest cost possible. And it does that perfectly, so it’s highly recommended for anything starting from a home office to a big office environment.

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