Constructed for midsize to large offices and workgroups, the Ricoh MP 501SPF Black and White Laser Multifunction Printer ($3,499) means business and then some. Out of the box it comes with a richer feature set and greater functionality than your average high volume monochrome laser all-in-one (AIO), and if it doesn't do what you want by default, rest assured, there's an add-on that can.
In addition to printing well, and fast, everything about the 501SPF, its huge monthly duty cycle, highly expandable high capacity paper input, tablet size touch screen control panel, 350GB hard drive, and incredibly low cost per page, screams high volume. Nevertheless, too many of the most beneficial and more common features, such as Wi-Fi, fax, and optical character recognition (OCR), are (often expensive) add-ons, given its lofty price, which is just enough to prevent it from get our Editors' Choice bow. Aside from that, though, the 501SPF is a extremely capable and sophisticated high volume monochrome laser printer.
Is It a Printer, or a Computer That Prints?
Trying to discuss all the 501SPF's features and add-ons would make for a War and Peace length review, so I'll concentrate on the highlights. In view of all that it does, it's not as big and heavy as you might wish. Out of the box it measures 25.4 by 18.7 by 19.8 inches (HWD) and weighs 61.6 pounds. That makes it a few inches smaller and more than 50 pounds lighter than the HP LaserJet Enterprise M4555h MFP and close in size and girth to the HP LaserJet Enterprise 500 MFP M525f, both of which has like features and expansion options and is similarly priced to the 501SPF. All of them require their own bench, countertop, or stand to sit on.
Designed to churn out thousands of pages each month, the 501SPF's maximum monthly task cycle is 250,000 pages, with a recommended monthly print volume of 16,600 pages, which is close to 1,000 pages each business day every month. Those volume ratings are four and five times higher than the two HP Enterprise models said in the previous paragraph. In addition, the Editors' Choice Dell B3465dnf Mono Multifunction Printer has a duty cycle of 150,000 pages per month, and that company's much less expensive single function monochrome laser, the Smart Printer S5830dn, has a 300,000 page duty cycle with 50,000 pages recommended, just in case you have a high monthly print volume.
The out of the box paper handling is 600 sheets, split between a 500 sheet cassette and 100 sheet multipurpose tray. You can kick that up to 2,600 sheets via up to four additional 500 sheet drawers ($309 each). Ricoh also offers Teflon lined drawers, as well as those that have locking mechanisms for $485 and $455 each, respectively. Three sizes of canister based stands and cabinets are also available. HP's M525f and M4555h also come able to hold up to 600 sheets of paper, and they're expandable to 1,600 and 2,100 sheets, respectively.
For scanning multipage documents, the 501SPF comes with a 75 page reversing automatic document feeder (ADF). "Reversing" is just another way of saying "auto-duplexing," meaning that it can, in addition to scanning multipage documents, scan both sides of two sided pages. "Reversing" is the older standard whereby the ADF passes one side over the scanner, pulls the sheet back in, flips it, and then scans the other side.
The 501SPF has a built-in 350GB hard disk drive that you can use as a document server. According to Ricoh, the drive stores up to 3,000 2,000 page documents in a maximum of 200 folders. Ricoh says that this document server will interact with several different document management programs and cloud sites, such as Dropbox, eFileCabinet, and Google Drive. The HP M525f and M4555h have only 120GB drives, and neither of the two Dell models mentioned earlier have hard drives. In addition, the 501SPF supports both USB thumb drives and SD card flash memory. The ports are located on the left edge of the 10.1 inches tablet like touch screen control panel.
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In addition to providing a means to setting the printer and perform walkup tasks, such as making copies or printing from the cloud or a memory drive, the 501SPF's 10.1 inches touch screen control panel (it literally looks like Ricoh attached a tablet to the spot where, on most AIOs, sits a much smaller display) is fully customizable. Each user can create his or her own personalized interface with the features and customized workflow choice that work best for how he or she uses the printer.
Ricoh calls this WorkStyle Innovation Technology, and it allows users to download widgets and workflow apps from the Ricoh Application Site and place them on their own home screens to streamline interaction with the printer with one touch shortcuts for most workflow scenarios, such as, say, scanning to a particular cloud site or network folder, or probably printing from the internal hard drive.
Unfortunately, though, many of the 501SPF's add-ons, such as the ability to send and receive faxes, Wi-Fi and other wireless features, OCR, NFC card reader, and some others are optional add-ons. Not only do they cost extra, but some of them (which come free with several much less-expensive monochrome laser printers) such as, say, Wi-Fi ($489) and fax ($299), are downright expensive, adding to the price of this already costly machine.
Connectivity (Onboard and Optional) and Security
Along with the previously mentioned USB and SD card drive support, you can also print using Adobe PostScript, HP PCL emulation, and PDF, but for some reason Microsoft's XPS format requires an add-on. The free Ricoh Smart Device Connector app provides mobile device support, as well as near field communication (NFC), Bluetooth, and scanning to popular cloud sites. Again, the list of all this app does, including sending content to Ricoh projectors, is impressive. Ethernet and USB connectivity comes standard, and you can get a second NIC (network interface card) for connecting to an external print server or network drive for a list price of $125.
The internal drive can be locked down so tight that only one user can access it, or everybody can have full or limited access, and a feature called Locked Print (most vendors call this Secure Print) securely stores documents in the queue until you retrieve them. I mentioned earlier that each user (or department) can have their own security rights setup of the printer itself, but the level of security you have over each account is quite extensive. You can control which documents an individual user or department can print, when they can print, and how much they can print, you can, for example, control your printing costs with quotas. Ricoh's optional Device Manager NX Accounting app provides extensive options for controlling costs, including the ability to issue chargebacks.
Not the Fastest, but Speedy Enough
Ricoh rates the 501SPF at 52 one sided (simplex) pages per minute (ppm) with a first page out time of 6 seconds or less. The printer defaults, though, to duplex (two sided) printing, and to change that, you must open the printer driver during the printing process and physically change the finishing option to "Print on One Side." In cases like this, we report both the simplex and duplex print speeds. That said, when printing our 12 pages simply formatted all-text Microsoft Word document in duplex mode, the 501SPF managed 40.3ppm, which is fast for churning out two sided pages.
The HP AIOs discussed earlier were tested with a different methodology, therefore, we can't use their print times here, and we don't have many recent models in this class to make comparisons to. Nevertheless, for comparison's sake, the single function Dell S5830dn mentioned earlier (it's rated at 60ppm simplex) printed the same two-sided pages at the rate of 35.3ppm. When printing the same Word document in simplex mode, the 501SPF managed 52.8ppm, just over its 52ppm rating. Here, the S5830dn managed 62.2ppm, and the much less expensive and smaller capacity Xerox VersaLink B400/DN churned at 47.8ppm, compared with its 47ppm rating.
When I combined the results from printing our suite of color PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint documents containing photos, charts, and graphics with the results from the preceding test, the 501SPF managed 19.3ppm (18.5ppm duplex), compared with the S5830dn's 23.8 (22.3 duplex) and the B400/DN's 18.8ppm (13.4 duplex). These aren't, of course, the most ideal comparisons, but they do provide some general and contextual relevance.
Not that you would use your expensive huge monochrome laser printer for churning out photos, but I tested that anyway. The 501SPF printed our test 4 by 6 inch snapshots at an average of 17 seconds, or about average for this class of printer. The 501SPF's print quality looked good across the board, with well shaped and very legible text, near flawless business graphics, and better than acceptable grayscale photos, making it suitable for most business applications, including those that require small fonts.
Rock Bottom Running Costs
Keeping in mind that when printing thousands of pages each month, the per-page price of consumables, is at this level a very important consideration. Why? Well, for every 20,000 pages you print, for instance, a 0.5 cent difference in the cost per page (CPP) will cost you $100 (printing 500,000 pages, then, will cost you $2,500). That said, if you buy Ricoh's sole 25,000 pages black toner cartridge for this AIO for the price on the company's website ($135), your 501SPF's running costs will come out to half a cent per page.
In addition, while writing this I found that same original Ricoh cartridge on several sites for as low as $60. If you pay that much for a 25,000 pages cartridge, your running costs will be 0.2 cents per page. The two HP Enterprise printers discussed earlier deliver well more than 1 cent per page, with the M525FS at 1.8 cents per page.
Depending how much you print, it might take a while to recoup the difference in price between the 501SPF and these other models, but perhaps not nearly as long as you may think. Printing 500,000 pages at the difference of 1.3 cents per page will save you $6,500. When you look at it from that perspective, the 501SPF's get price doesn't seem so embarrassing.
Spend Money to Make Money
The Ricoh MP 501SPF Black and White Laser Multifunction Printer is a very high volume AIO with a high volume AIO price. Not only does it print well and fast, but it's loaded with features, such as a large built-in hard drive for managing your documents and the highly customizable 10.1 inches control panel that allows you to manage each user's and department's access to the printer and its features.
In addition, it's very expansible, and it has the lowest running costs that we've seen in some time low enough, in fact, that if you use this AIO the way it's designed to be used for printing thousands of pages each month you could recover the difference in what you pay for this model over its lower cost high volume competitors. Overall, I'm impressed with the 501SFP. If so many important features, such as Wi-Fi, NFC, and fax, weren't add-ons (and weren't so expensive), it would have earned an Editors' Choice nod.
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