Ricoh SP 3600DN review

Ricoh's SP 3600DN is a fast mono printer for a small office or workgroup. It's designed for fairly hard use, with maximum duty of 50,000 pages per month, and a claimed speed of up to 30 pages per minute (ppm). It doesn't support wireless networking and there's no front-panel USB port for walk-up printing, but there is a wired Ethernet port at the rear. Moreover, duplex (double-sided) printing is standard, and the maximum print resolution is 1,200dpi - more detailed than the 600dpi you get on entry-level printers.

The basic settings in Ricoh's print driver are simple enough...

...but things are less clear when you head into the detailed settings

The SP 3600DN feels built to cope with clumsy office use. The 250-sheet paper tray is sturdy and comes with a handy gauge to let you know when it's running low on paper. At the right there's also a size wheel, which serves to tell you and the printer what size paper is loaded - provided you remember to change it when necessary. Above, the 100-sheet bypass tray feels bullet-proof, while the stop at the front of the 125-sheet output tray feels similarly robust. Unusually at this price, you can upgrade this printer with an additional 250- or 500-sheet cassette, for a maximum 850-sheet capacity.

Use the web interface to administer the SP 3600DN remotely

This printer arrives with a standard, 20,000-page drum and a 1,500-page starter toner, after which replacements for the latter can be had with either a 3,000- or 6,000-page capacity. Stick to the bigger cartridge and costs work out at a low 1.2p per page, or 1.3p if you include the maintenance box you'll need after 120,000 pages. We doubt many home users will get that far, but very heavy users could buy this printer and produce 100,000 A4 pages for about £1,300.

We found the SP 3600DN quite slow to start printing unless its cooling fans were still running from a previous job, in which case the time to first page (TTFP) was about 16 seconds. Once they had stopped, we timed this at 20-25 seconds, depending on how long the printer had been idle. It soon made up for the hesitant start, though, despatching our 25-page text test at a rate of 23.8ppm. Over 100 pages it reached 28.6ppm.

T ext quality was p redictably excellent, with dark black characters and razor-sharp outlines. Graphics were also good, although the deep black toner made them a little too dark in places, and there was a slight trace of banding - a common vice in laser-class printers. We saw the same issues with photos, but otherwise these were unusually good for this class of printer, with crisp details and subtle shading without obvious half-toning artefacts. Unfortunately, we couldn't print DL envelopes without bad creases appearing in them.

This printer is overkill for light home use, but its speed, durability, duplex printing and low costs make it ideal for anyone wanting to print a lot on a modest budget. In particular, the availability of paper tray upgrades means it could grow with a small firm or business.