The Ricoh Aficio CL3500N has a neat and professional appearance that will look good in any office. At $700 (as of 10/6/2006), this networked color laser has enough features to support a small workgroup. You get a generous 530-sheet main paper tray with a built-in 100-sheet bypass tray that folds down from the front. This lets the two trays share the same paper path, but increases the depth of the main tray. When you extend the main tray to its full depth to accept legal-size paper, it projects through a flap at the back of the printer, which lifts to form a dust cover over the paper. You can feed envelopes only from the bypass tray, where you can stack them up to 10 high. The output bin on top of the printer holds up to 250 sheets.
Ricoh Aficio CL3500N Laser Printer (22 PPM, 1200x1200 DPI, Color, 128MB, PC/Mac)
- Spec Navigator
- Core Components
- Media Handling
- Network
- Connectivity
- Platform Support
- Dimensions
- General Features
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- Included Software
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Media Handling
| Manual Feed Slot | Yes |
| Maximum Number of Input Trays | 4 |
| Maximum paper size, height | 14.0 inches |
| Maximum Sheets With All Paper Trays | 1690 |
| Output Tray Capacity | 250 |
| Standard Number of Input Trays | 2 |
| Maximum paper size, width | 8.5 inches |
| Standard input sheet capacity | 630 |
| Duplex printing | No |
Connectivity
| Other Interfaces |
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| Parallel Port | Yes |
| Serial Port | No |
| USB 1.1 | No |
| USB 2.0 | Yes |
Platform Support
| Operating System Support |
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General Features
| PostScript Type | Genuine Adobe Postscript 3, PDF Direct |
| Printer Emulation Type | Auto Emulation Switching |
| Media slots |
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| PictBridge compatible | No |
| Printer languages supported | PCL6, PCL5c |
- Lab Tested
- How We Test Printers »
Pros
Good paper handling
Economical operating costs
Cons
Low print quality
Many parts require maintenance
Bottom Line
Excellent paper handling is the CL3500N’s best feature, but graphics and text print quality was disappointing.
Ricoh Aficio CL3500N
Aficio CL3500N Laser Printer (22 PPM, 1200x1200 DPI, Color, 128MB, PC/Mac) Review, by Paul Jasper October 19, 2006
You can add up to two more 530-sheet paper trays for $350 each to increase the maximum paper capacity to an impressive 1690 sheets. An optional duplexer is available for a reasonable $230.
Note that because Ricoh sells its printers through dealers who support their customers directly, the company quotes the prices it suggests to its dealers. These may be slightly higher than the street prices we usually see from vendors.
At the center of the CL3500N's neatly arranged control panel is a backlit two-line LCD. Operating the menu is easy enough, but you can achieve most administrative tasks through the included monitoring tools. The printer supports both PCL and PostScript.
To the left of the output bin, a panel lifts to reveal the simple and compact toner cartridges, which are little more than plastic containers. Ricoh ships the printer with black and color toner cartridges rated for 2500 pages each, but the company prices the higher-capacity replacements very competitively. A black cartridge rated for 7000 pages costs $57 and each of the three 6000-page color cartridges costs $121. However, many other parts require regular replacement. The photoconductor units last a relatively short 15,000 pages. The black unit costs $119, whereas Ricoh supplies the color units as a single item for $327. The fuser unit ($275) and transfer belt ($132) must be replaced every 100,000 pages. You need a new waste toner pack ($30) every 56,000 pages. Even with all these maintenance items, the CL3500N achieves remarkably economical per-page costs of just 2.1 cents for black and 9.5 cents for color.
The main reason to buy a laser printer is for high-quality text, but the CL3500N scored worse than most other printers in our tests. Pages printed too densely: Italics lacked finesse and bold characters bled together. We saw many artifacts in artistic fonts, such as flat bottoms on what should have been curved characters. Diagonal edges in larger characters looked jagged and a little fuzzy. The printer did a better job on our tricky line-art test, but the results still came out too dark and showed some banding. Our grayscale image displayed some odd-looking green and red fringes, and grainy tonal changes. On plain paper, our graphics samples looked grainy, with dark shadows and oversaturated highlights. On the Hammermill Glossy Color Laser Printer paper selected by Ricoh for our best-quality photo test, we saw narrow horizontal and vertical banding, strong dithering patterns, and very oversaturated colors.
The CL3500N printed text pages at a close-to-average 15.1 pages per minute. Plain-paper graphics printed at a more competitive 5.7 ppm, but glossy photos at best-quality settings printed at just 1.2 ppm.
Existing Ricoh customers who want to add color printing capabilities to their offices will be attracted to the CL3500N. Its print quality is acceptable for many everyday business documents, but users with more demanding requirements should ask for a demo using some of their typical print jobs before deciding whether to buy.
Paul Jasper
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- Rating Breakdown
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66
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82
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82
- See Complete Lab Results »
Performance Comparison with Similar Printers
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Performance
| 300dpi Line Art Image (secs) | 14.86 |
| 4 by 6 Color Photo (secs) | 20.28 |
| 4 by 6 Grayscale Photo (secs) | 16.66 |
| Color Output Quality | Poor |
| Color Photo Quality | Fair |
| Copy Output Quality | n/a |
| Copy Quality | n/a |
| Grayscale Glossy Output Quality | n/a |
| Grayscale Output Quality | Poor |
| Line Art Output Quality | Good |
| One-Page Webpage (secs) | 16.18 |
| Output Score, Color Graphics, Default Settings (formerly pf-Output-Print-Color-Default) | Poor |
| Output Score, Color Photo, Best Quality Settings (formerly pf-Output-Print-Color-Best) | Poor |
| Output Score, Grayscale Graphics, Best Quality Settings (formerly pf-Output-Print-Grayscale-Best) | Fair |
| Output Score, Line Art, Default Settings (formerly pf-Output-Print-LineArt-Default) | Good |
| Output Score, Text, Default Settings (formerly pf-Output-Print-Text-Default) | Fair |
| Overall Scan Quality | n/a |
| Sports Action Shot (secs) | 50.56 |
| Ten-Page Word Document | 40.38 |
| Ten-Page Word Document (secs) | 40.38 |
| Tested Color Graphics Speed (formerly pf-PCWColorSpeed) | 5.7 |
| Tested Color Speed (ppm) | 4.3 |
| Tested Glossy Photo Speed (ppm) | 1.2 |
| Tested Grayscale Speed (ppm) | 3.6 |
| Tested Lineart Speed (ppm) | 4 |
| Tested Photo Speed (formerly pf-PCWPhotoSpeed) | 1.2 |
| Tested Text Speed (formerly pf-PCWBWSpeed) | 15.1 |
| Tested Text Speed (ppm) | 19.3 |
| Text Output Quality | Fair |
| Three-Page Word Document | 20.74 |
| Three-Page Word Document (secs) | 20.74 |
| Two-Page Excel Document | 18.98 |
| Two-Page Excel Document (secs) | 18.98 |
Text Printing
| Text output quality | Fair |
Review Now! Already own it? Tell us What You Think
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Reviewed by:
Strengths: Customer Service is very friendly, low up front cost.
Weaknesses: Too many parts that need changed. Parts breakdown very quickly. No warning that parts need changed, it's a guessing game that is very expensive.
Overall: I have owned several laser printers and this one is by far the most unreliable. I've had the best luck with xerox and brother printers, I purchase this one because it was on sale and had the features I wanted - if only I knew how fragile and unstable the printer was, I would not have taken it for free.
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Reviewed by: nbozick
Strengths: Speed and color quality
Weaknesses: Life of the printer is very short. We are running multiple 3500s and one just burned out after running only 15,000 copies! Another burned out after only 34,000 copies!
Overall: Life cycle of this printer is very poor. Supplies do not last the expected life printed in the owners manual. The 3500s we are using also tend to jam. The paper tray is very sensitive to any paper dust.
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Reviewed by:
Strengths: Fast, Nice color printing, low upfront cost
Weaknesses: maintenance
Overall: This thing seems like a constant need machine. frequent toner cartridges, Color PCU, Black PCU, Waste toner cartridge, and a couple minor mechanical problems fixed under warranty.Most of these costs are not very high, but when they occur, it takes the printer out of service, always at the worst possible time.
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Reviewed by: WillFreeman
Strengths: Low upfront cost, relatively low per-page cost, quality construction (built like a tank), large paper tray, nice printer driver options, PostScript 3.
Weaknesses: None that I can think of.
Overall: This is a quality printer, with a large monthly duty cycle (50,000 pages) compared to other printers in its price range. The high capacity toner carts are a nice feature (7,000 pages black; 6,000 color) Overall, they give a low per-page cost. I am really pleased with this printer. It's fast (22 ppm) and gives a professional edge to my work (mapping, cartography). The duplexing unit makes printing very slick ... the duplexer seems a little pricey for the plastic you get, but I think it's worth it anyway.
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Reviewed by: petertur
Strengths: Super sharp printer that never came out of my inkjet printer. The speed is phenomenal. It is super easy to use. The print quality is outstanding. Doesn't kill my computer start-up like my inkjet did.
Weaknesses: Didn't say they were selling the printer with the half filled toner cartridges. You may need some help setting-up because of the 72 lb weight.
Overall: The Ricoh printer is a major leap over the inkjet printer. It hold a ream of paper in loading and you can add additional paper. It prints beautiful pictures 8 x 11 with a click. This is what I thought a printer should be. I will never have to worry if I have to print something again how the color will look.
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