Ricoh CL7000 Toner
Aficio CL7000 Toner Cartridges

Ricoh CL7000 Printer Review

The Ricoh CL7000 is a color laser printer designed for the medium or large office environment. Its fast speeds and flexibility make it easy to recommend, but its bulky frame requires a lot of space.

No doubt about it, the CL7000 is a fairly bulky printer. It measures 22.7 inches by 29.3 inches by 29.3 inches and weighs 187 pounds with the toner cartridges. Fortunately, it packs a lot of punch into its bulky frame. Its paper capacity is an impressive 1,100 sheets, divided among two 500 sheet trays and one 100 sheet tray. Additional trays can be added for more capacity as well. Memory can also be expanded from its initial 64 MB or RAM to a maximum of 384 MB, and is a relatively inexpensive upgrade.

The Ricoh CL7000 also supports a wide variety of media, including plain paper, card stock, labels, and transparencies. It supports a wide variety of media sizes as well, up to 12 by 18 inches. Connection options include parallel port and ethernet port. It does not include a USB port, but most users will probably use its network port anyway, as the CL7000 is clearly designed for a large networked office environment.

Ricoh CL7000 toner cartridges have a capacity of 10,000 pages for each of its three color cartridges, and 20,000 pages for its black cartridge. The Ricoh CL7000 toner cartridges are accessed from a front panel, and are easy to replace.

Print quality is very good. Text is sharp and detailed, but not as sharp as some monochrome laser printers, especially at small font sizes. Color graphics and photos from the ink toner printer are excellent, with very few noticeable flaws. Some photo prints look nearly as good as inkjet photo prints. Print speeds are 38 pages per minute for black and 28 pages per minute for color.

Overall, the Ricoh CL7000 is a solid network printer for the office that needs color printing as well as monochrome. It has the speed and capacity to keep up with a large office.