Ricoh CL5000 Toner
Aficio CL5000 Toner Cartridges

Ricoh CL5000 Printer Review

The Ricoh Aficio CL5000 could very well answer the call of a reliable color laser printer for your office or workgroup. The printer will produce great looking text down to small font sizes and when printing small thin parallel lines only small tendencies of distortion are present. Print at 21 pages per minute on average for black and white print jobs, which is a bit faster than the LaserJet 2840 toner printer. Networking is standard on the Ricoh CL5000 with a 10/100Base TX ethernet as well as parallel and USN ports which are found on most models today. An external wireless print server can be found from Ricoh and a number of other manufacturers.

This printer only comes with a 350 sheet input, and you will definitely need to upgrade this. Maybe not to the full 3,100 sheets but if you are a demanding business you will need more. Although the unit is a 130 pound printer, slide out handles makes moving it easy with the help of a few others. The LCD screen is not back lit and will need more light in the area to see its display.

Text printing was great, but the graphics fell behind in speed at about 5 pages per minute. Gray scaling and photo quality this unit is not capable of with the lower-quality printer toner. The graphics are great for small nuances of color, used for accents but not full documents. The Ricoh Aficio CL5000 also has an interesting feature that enables the printer to place a plain sheet of paper between each transparency printed so they are not damaged during printing.