It's not often a new print technology comes to market, such is the power and maturity of inkjet and laser technology. OK, there's OKI's LED office printing and Canon's dye sublimation photo prints, but both these systems have been around for a while. Ricoh's Gelsprinters use gel ink, a bit like that found in gel pens.

The ink is more viscous than the thin liquid used in inkjets and dries pretty much on contact with the paper. Although it takes some extra technology to keep it workable and prevent the heads drying out, it has advantages in speed and ease of paper handling.

The Aficio GX2500 is the entry-level Gelsprinter in Ricoh's range. It's quite basic in some ways, with just a single USB connection (though a network link is an option) and no expansion through extra paper trays or a duplexer. The spec sheet misleadingly describes duplex as ‘automatic' and ‘standard', but this comes down to instructions on turning the paper over to manually print the second side.

The printer is big compared with a typical inkjet, taking a paper tray of up to 250 A4 sheets from the front and feeding pages out to the tray's top cover, HP-style. Rather than being fed via rollers, Ricoh uses an electrostatically-charged belt, which it claims keeps the paper much flatter while being printed.

Ink is fed from four fairly substantial cartridges, which slot in on the right, below the printer's control panel. Controls consist of a 16-character, 2-line LCD display with no backlight and simple push-buttons for navigating its menus.

The colour cartridges are claimed to yield 1,000 pages, while the black cartridge should be good for 1,500. Ricoh also claims the printer can produce 28 pages per minute in both black and colour, though under test it took 33 seconds to produce five black text pages and 38 seconds for mixed text and colour graphics. These times equate to 9.1ppm and 7.9ppm. These are still impressive results when compared with typical inkjets.

Text print quality on plain paper is a bit patchy, literally, with some of the paper fibres showing through and producing print that looks a little light. Things are better with colour graphics and very good when printing photos, though Ricoh makes little of this and doesn't even provide an easy way of loading 15 x 10cm photo blanks: A4 is the order of the day.

Verdict
Although comparatively cheap for its specification, Ricoh's Aficio GX2500 is not that cheap to run, with ISO black pages costing 2.6p and colour ones costing 12.5p. However, the colour cost may fall when consumables become available from more sources. As a first generation gel printer this is a good device and, assuming it sells well, we can expect even better from forthcoming Gelsprinters.

Company: Ricoh

Contact: 020 8261 4000

Tags: ricoh printer paper inkjet printer light-emitting diode dye-sublimation printer printing hardware