Ricoh CL7200 and CL7200D

I am considering a Ricoh CL7200D printer for our office.

Update 8/3/2006 - I bought one! We have had our printer for almost five months and average about 5,000 color pages per month. The printer works great with thick (24lb and up) paper and I am very happy with the low cost of toner. Continue reading the comments at the bottom of this page for more information.

While researching reviews on-line, I happened to find a Usenet post by someone who had purchased a CL7200. I emailed the author to ask how he liked the printer, and this was his answer. Hopefully it will help someone else searching for information on the Ricoh CL7200.

Not entirely happy.

I bought it for one major project, and for that one it put out excellent high resolution color on 11X23" paper using the postscript driver. The PCL and RPCS drivers don't color match nearly as well, and the output is sub-par compared to the postscript.

So long as the printer prints well using the PS driver, I don't need the others.

But lately I have been having color registration problems.

And the most frustrating problem: Using the postscript driver I can't predict what color will result when I place color text over a dark background in Adobe InDesign. For example, if I place orange type and an orange rectangle over a purple background, the rectangle prints at the specified orange color and the type prints at a very pure yellow, not nearly the same.

The only way to get around the problem that I have found, after much searching online and much dropping of forum requests, is to convert the type to outlines. Once they are converted to outlines, they print orange -- but then they are no longer editable text.

The problem exists even if I output the InDesign file to a pdf. If I convert to outlines the pdf prints color accurately; if I don't convert to outlines the pdf prints unpredictably off-color text.

Ricoh support has been no help at all on this issue. I sent a test file to Ricoh and to my printer vendor. The vendor experienced the same problem on the same model printer; Ricoh reported there was no problem when they printed it. Very frustrating. They passed the hot potato off to a local hardware tech, but in a phone call we both agreed that there was nothing he could do: the machine hardware can print orange and all the other colors fine; it's the software drivers or the firmware that are screwing things up.

You can contact Richard Galli through his website at www.richardgalli.com  ¶ Permalink 3/19/2006 07:15:00 AM