Ricoh Aficio GX 2500 review

Ricoh's Aficio GX 2500 is an inkjet printer with a difference: rather than use tanks of liquid ink, it uses gel-based ink.

Confusingly, Ricoh refers to this as a 'liquid gel' technology, but there are differences between this and traditional 'wet ink' inkjet printers. One of the advantages of using gel-based inks lies in how the cartridges are installed and used. These are slim objects similar in size to CD cases, and they're plugged into the front of the printer. The gel-based ink they contain is transferred to reservoirs inside the printer as you print, before being expelled onto the paper using a 1200dpi piezo-electric printing process similar to that in Epson inkjets. Keeping the cartridges off the printhead means that a cartridge can be used up and replaced without having to abort a print, and having one for each colour is always good to see.

Setting up the printer was mostly simple, although because the installation CD was Windows-only, we had to turn to the Ricoh website for help. The Mac driver we found was billed as being for Mac OS X 10.4, with no mention of support for OS X 10.5 anywhere. Fortunately, the software proved able to work in Leopard, although we did notice some redraw issues in one of the print setup panels.

The printer tray is solid and would comfortably hold more than 200 sheets of good-quality plain paper. With specialist inkjet paper, the quantity it can take depends on the thickness of the stock. We tested the printer with different kinds of stock and it didn't have any problems with any of them. It didn't differentiate automatically, but more about that later. During our tests, the levels of the gel ink dropped at the same speeds that we'd expect from normal inkjet printers. It was very handy having the current amount of ink in each cartridge shown in the printer's LCD display, although it would be good to see more fine-grain detail than this provides.

The printer driver does a reasonable job for basic output, but it did tend to trim off the top of images when trying to fit content to the page, and accessing any options to improve the output quality involved more poking around in different panels than we liked. There was no apparent ColorSync support; in fact, no real colour management control beyond an Adjust Color Density dialog box buried two layers deep inside an optional printer setup panel. This provides separate CMYK sliders to control the strength of each ink, but this didn't prove particularly useful. The sliders give just nine-step increments, there's no feedback on how much difference changes will make, and the sliders don't stay where they're put across print jobs.

In plain paper mode, printing was fast - the kind of speed we normally see in draft mode with other inkjet printers. The speed of output will vary depending on a number of factors, slightly depending on how much of the page has to be covered. With designs that have white space, the printheads don't need to cover as much ground, so the paper gets through more quickly.

Printing a very large bitmap image makes the printer take its time, comparatively speaking. However, by large we mean a 200MB image, and by taking its time, we mean pausing for a few seconds every inch or so, and taking 40 seconds to finish the page rather than the normal sub-10 second speeds that it manages with more reasonable image sizes or page layouts. This isn't likely to feel particularly slow unless you're terminally impatient.

Of course, the quality this produces is reasonable for general-purpose use, but we wouldn't exactly describe it as impressive. To get this printer working at its best, you'll need to switch it to the much, much slower Inkjet Glossy mode in one of the panels of the Printer dialog. And switch it again when you print another document at best quality, and again for the next one.