Ricoh Aficio CL5000

WHAT'S HOT: The Ricoh Aficio CL5000 ripped through text-printing jobs at 21.3 ppm--faster than any other recent printer we've tested, and half again as fast as the average--so you definitely won't need to supplement it with a monochrome laser. It also produced stellar text quality, rendering very clean and solid type even at small sizes, and it printed narrow parallel lines with only a hint of roughness. The main paper tray holds 11-by-17-inch paper, and the printer has an auxiliary tray that can feed 12-by-18-inch paper--not bad for a $3000 machine.

Using the printer's control panel is easy, thanks to buttons that match the menus displayed on the LCD (though we wish the LCD were backlit), and Ricoh's documentation--except for the setup guide--is excellent, with separate detailed manuals on network administration and client management. The CL5000's driver has a clever feature for printing transparencies: You can instruct the printer to insert a blank slip sheet between each transparency so they don't stick together or get scratched. Another plus: Moving the 130-pound, 27-by-25-inch machine is no sweat, thanks to four sturdy metal rods that slide out and give two or four people secure handles for lifting it.

WHAT'S NOT: The CL5000 didn't blaze through our graphics tests: At 2.6 ppm, it printed at only two-thirds the average speed of recent printers. We wouldn't recommend the CL5000 for gray-scale graphics at all, since we saw marked streaking and a graininess that obliterated detail. Color graphics from the CL5000 were of middling quality, with weaker colors and less detail than we'd have liked, but with good texture and transitions. Together, the main paper tray and the auxiliary tray hold only 350 sheets, so if your workgroup generates anything more than light printer traffic, you'll probably need to invest in at least one optional sheet feeder.

The set-up guide, which consists of two large posters folded together, provides adequate instructions except on the crucial details of when to connect the printer and when to run the driver installer. As a result, getting the PostScript driver installed took some guesswork, though the PCL driver popped up on its own. The CL5000's engine design is one of the kludgiest we've seen. The drums slide in horizontally through the side door on racks and then have to be connected to wires that dangle inside the printer; to replace the toner cartridges, you open the front door and pull the cartridges out through holes in the drums.