Ricoh Aficio SPC220N review

Ricoh's Aficio SPC220N is one of the more compact printers here, and is small enough to fit on most desks.

Installation was straightforward and the printer's IP address was detected immediately. Ricoh's Smart Organising Monitor can be installed separately. It provides several useful features, including a status monitor. A web interface includes many of the same monitoring features, which are particularly useful as the printer has no screen.

The driver makes it easy to switch between colour and mono printing, and you can set mono printing as the default mode in Windows' Printing Preferences options, which is handy if you print a lot of material that doesn't need to be in colour.

Print quality was generally good, despite being limited to 600dpi, with no enhancement options. However, even 8pt text in our small font size tests was broken, particularly on serif fonts. Normal text at 10pt and above was clear and sharp. Colour prints were bright, but the printer lost some pale tones in our greyscale shading test.

Image printing options include Speed, Standard and Fine gradation settings, which alter the way in which colour is reproduced, particularly in subtly shaded photographic images. Fine dithering produced the best results, but our 10x8in photos took over a minute longer to print. Envelope printing was problematic. We had difficulty getting the printer to use the single-sheet bypass tray either automatically or when we specified it as the paper source.

Mono and colour print speeds of 18.1ppm and 12.9ppm were above average, and a time to first page of just 10 seconds was matched only by Epson's outstanding Aculaser C2800N. Unfortunately, the SPC220N costs a fortune to run. A simple mono page costs 3.2p, while a colour page costs 14.7p, producing a massive total page cost of 17.9p. This is unacceptably high for any printer and rules the SPC220N out of contention for an award.

Author: Kat Orphanides