Ricoh MP 501SPF Black and White Laser Multifunction Printer - Review 2022

Designed for midsize to big offices and workgroups, the Ricoh MP 501SPF Black and White Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation Multifunction Printer ($three,499) ways business organization—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-1 (AIO), and if it doesn't do what you want by default, rest assured, there'south an add-on that can.

In add-on to printing well, and fast, everything most the 501SPF—its huge monthly duty cycle, highly expandable high-capacity paper input, tablet-size bear upon screen control panel, 350GB difficult drive, and incredibly low price per page—screams high-volume. Even so, too many of the most useful and more than common features, such equally Wi-Fi, fax, and optical grapheme recognition (OCR), are (often expensive) add-ons, given its lofty cost, which is just plenty to preclude it from gaining our Editors' Choice nod. Aside from that, though, the 501SPF is a highly capable and sophisticated high-volume monochrome light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation printer.

Is It a Printer, or a Computer That Prints?

Trying to talk over all the 501SPF's features and add-ons would make for a State of war and Peace-length review, then I'll concentrate on the highlights. Considering all that it does, it'southward not equally large and heavy as you might expect. Out of the box it measures 25.4 past 18.seven by xix.eight 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 up to sit on.

Designed to churn out thousands of pages each calendar month, the 501SPF'south maximum monthly duty cycle is 250,000 pages, with a recommended monthly impress volume of 16,600 pages, which is close to ane,000 pages each business concern solar day per calendar month. Those volume ratings are 4 and five times higher than the 2 HP Enterprise models mentioned in the previous paragraph. In addition, the Editors' Choice Dell B3465dnf Mono Multifunction Printer has a duty cycle of 150,000 pages per calendar month, and that company'southward much less expensive single-function monochrome laser, the Smart Printer S5830dn, has a 300,000-page duty cycle with l,000 pages recommended, just in case y'all accept a very loftier monthly impress book.

The out-of-the-box paper handling is 600 sheets, split between a 500-sail cassette and 100-sail multipurpose tray. You tin can kick that upwardly to two,600 sheets via up to iv boosted 500-canvass drawers ($309 each). Ricoh also offers Teflon-lined drawers, too as those that have locking mechanisms for $485 and $455 each, respectively. Iii sizes of canister-based stands and cabinets are also available. HP'due south M525f and M4555h besides come able to hold upwardly to 600 sheets of paper, and they're expandable to 1,600 and two,100 sheets, respectively.

For scanning multipage documents, the 501SPF comes with a 75-page reversing automated certificate feeder (ADF). "Reversing" is only another manner 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 canvass back in, flips it, and then scans the other side.

The 501SPF has a built-in 350GB hd that you lot tin utilise as a document server. According to Ricoh, the drive stores up to 3,000 2,000-folio documents in a maximum of 200 folders. Ricoh says that this document server will interact with several different document-direction programs and cloud sites, such every bit Dropbox, eFileCabinet, and Google Drive. The HP M525f and M4555h have merely 120GB drives, and neither of the two Dell models mentioned earlier have hard drives. In add-on, the 501SPF supports both USB thumb drives and SD carte flash retention. The ports are located on the left edge of the ten.1-inch tablet-like touch screen control panel.

In improver to providing a means to configure the printer and perform walkup tasks, such as making copies or printing from the cloud or a memory drive, the 501SPF's 10.1-inch touch screen control panel (information technology literally looks similar Ricoh fastened a tablet to the spot where, on most AIOs, sits a much smaller display) is fully customizable. Each user tin can create his or her own personalized interface with the features and customized workflow options that work best for how he or she uses the printer.

Ricoh calls this WorkStyle Innovation Technology, and information technology 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 nigh workflow scenarios, such as, say, scanning to a particular cloud site or network folder, or maybe 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 exercise they cost extra, but some of them (which come up free with several much less-expensive monochrome light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation printers) such as, say, Wi-Fi ($489) and fax ($299), are downright expensive, calculation to the cost of this already plush machine.

Connectivity (Onboard and Optional) and Security

Along with the previously mentioned USB and SD card drive support; you lot tin can as well impress using Adobe PostScript, HP PCL emulation, and PDF, but for some reason Microsoft's XPS format requires an add-on. The gratuitous Ricoh Smart Device Connector app provides mobile device support, as well as near-field communication (NFC), Bluetooth, and scanning to pop 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 2nd NIC (network interface card) for connecting to an external print server or network drive for a list price of $125.

The internal drive can exist locked down so tight that only one user can access it, or everybody can have total or limited access, and a feature called Locked Print (most vendors call this Secure Impress) securely stores documents in the queue until you think them. I mentioned before that each user (or department) tin accept their own security rights setup of the printer itself, but the level of security you have over each account is quite extensive. You tin command which documents an individual user or section can print, when they can print, and how much they can print; you tin can, for example, control your printing costs with quotas. Ricoh's optional Device Director NX Accounting app provides all-encompassing options for controlling costs, including the power to consequence chargebacks.

At that place'southward a lot more, but nosotros should motion on.

Not the Fastest, but Speedy Enough

Ricoh rates the 501SPF at 52 one-sided (simplex) pages per infinitesimal (ppm) with a beginning page out time of 6 seconds or less. The printer defaults, though, to duplex (two-sided) printing, and to alter that, y'all must open the printer commuter during the printing procedure 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-page simply formatted all-text Microsoft Word document in duplex manner, the 501SPF managed 40.3ppm, which is fast for churning out ii-sided pages.

Related Story See How We Test Printers

The HP AIOs discussed before were tested with a unlike methodology; hence, we can't utilize their impress times here, and we don't have many recent models in this course to make comparisons to. Even so, 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 Give-and-take 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 (eighteen.5ppm duplex), compared with the S5830dn'southward 23.8 (22.3 duplex) and the B400/DN's 18.8ppm (xiii.4 duplex). These aren't, of course, the nearly ideal comparisons, but they practise provide some general and contextual relevance.

Non that you would employ your expensive huge monochrome laser printer for churning out photos, only I tested that anyway. The 501SPF printed our exam iv-by-6-inch snapshots at an average of 17 seconds, or about average for this class of printer.

The 501SPF'southward print quality looked good across the board, with well-shaped and highly legible text, well-nigh-flawless business concern graphics, and better-than-acceptable grayscale photos, making information technology suitable for most business applications, including those that require small fonts.

Rock Bottom Running Costs

Keeping in mind that when press 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 toll per page (CPP) volition toll you $100 (printing 500,000 pages, then, volition toll y'all $2,500). That said, if you buy Ricoh'southward sole 25,000-page black toner cartridge for this AIO for the cost on the company's website ($135), your 501SPF's running costs will come out to one-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-page cartridge, your running costs volition exist 0.2 cents per page. The two HP Enterprise printers discussed before deliver well more than 1 cent per page, with the M525FS at 1.eight cents per page.

Depending how much you print, it might take a while to recoup the difference in price betwixt the 501SPF and these other models, but possibly not nearly as long as yous may retrieve. Printing 500,000 pages at the difference of 1.3 cents per page volition save you $6,500. When you look at it from that perspective, the 501SPF'due south purchase toll doesn't seem so outrageous.

Spend Coin to Make Money

The Ricoh MP 501SPF Blackness and White Laser Multifunction Printer is a very high book AIO with a high-volume AIO price. Not only does information technology print well and fast, merely it's loaded with features, such as a big congenital-in difficult drive for managing your documents and the highly customizable ten.1-inch control panel that allows you to manage each user's and department's access to the printer and its features.

In addition, it's highly expandable, and it has the lowest running costs that we've seen in some fourth dimension; low enough, in fact, that if y'all use this AIO the fashion it's designed to be used—for printing thousands of pages each calendar month—you could recover the departure in what you pay for this model over its lower-cost high-volume competitors. Overall, I'm impressed with the 501SFP. If then many important features, such equally Wi-Fi, NFC, and fax, weren't add together-ons (and weren't so expensive), it would have earned an Editors' Choice nod.