Hi Don,
I have a Ricoh AP2610 (with duplexer), the predecessor to the AP600N. I got a great deal on it and have no regrets -- at the time, I could not have afforded an HP 11x17 printer under any circumstances, and my Ricoh has generally gotten the job done. However, it has been somewhat buggy, in ways my HP printers never were. For instance:
• When I have been printing single-sided sheets for a while, then switch to double-sided jobs, the printer often hangs. The problem can be solved by simply opening and closing the lid on the duplex unit. Subsequent duplex jobs will then print fine. This is a minor annoyance for me, because the printer is set up right next to my workstation and I don't even have to get up from my chair to open the duplex lid, but this might be more of a problem if you printer is in another room, for instance.
• The paper size of the bypass tray must be set manually, on the printer itself. The HP printers I have had automatically set the size of the bypass tray to the size of paper selected in Page Setup.
• Ditto for the paper type. The Ricoh has settings for various types and thickness of paper, but I almost never use them because you are required to set the paper type both in Page Setup *and* on the printer itself, and if they don't match, the job will not proceed.
• Depending on the paper weight, the bypass tray often does not feed well when there are only a few sheets left in the bypass tray.
• The bypass tray is very finicky about thick paper (cardstock) that has already been printed on one side. (Of course, cardstock is too thick for the duplexer to handle.)
• The toner cartridges (the AP600N uses the same toner cartridge as the AP2610) are extremely expensive -- often $250 or more, although provantage.com has them for $198.62. They also tend to be poor quality, IMO. It can sometimes be very difficult to get toner evenly distributed across the page. WARNING: do NOT shake these cartridges. These are not the kind of of cartridges you can shake. If you get uneven toner, you have to VERY GENTLY AND SLOWLY rock the cartridge back and forth so that the toner becomes more evenly distributed. But if you shake them too hard, the ink will spatter all over and the toner cartridge will be permanently ruined. Also, it seems many Ricoh toner cartridges reach the end of their useful lives prematurely -- not because the toner has been all used up, but because the cartridge starts printing dark blotches on the page. It will do this even if you simply print a blank document and run blank paper through the printer. I have not found a solution to this problem, other than replacing the cartridge, and reserving the old one for printing drafts.
• Printing in Classic is somewhat buggy -- you have to use the Adobe PostScript driver instead of the Apple LaserWriter driver, and you still get an error message after each job telling you that the job could not print, even though it just printed. Printing in OS X used to be even more buggy, requiring that the USB cable be disconnected and reconnected between each job, but -- much to my relief -- this problem was corrected with one of the updates to OS X 10.3 -- I think it was 10.3.4 that fixed the problem? Anyway, printing in OS X over USB is just fine now. My model doesn't have a network card, but I would assume that Ethernet and WiFi printing work just fine (even in Classic), provided you have the hardware for it.
• The maximum paper size it handles is 12x17. Arrg! If only it supported just *one more lousy inch*, you could print 12x18 booklets. This isn't a bug -- the documentation is quite clear that 17" is the maximum supported length. I was just hoping that I might somehow be able to get away with using 12x18 paper, but unfortunately that turned out not to be the case.
• Just generally, it's clear that the machine is cheaply constructed. The paper tray is flimsy, the bypass tray is very sticky and difficult to pull down, etc.
On the plus side, the print output of the Ricoh is very good (it is a PostScript printer) -- at least, when the toner cartridge is fresh. It's very fast as well. And the duplexer has been very reliable -- I think it's maybe jammed on me once in the past year (provided I don't use paper too heavy for it to handle), and maybe on one other occasion it has fed two pages through at once. It is also a very compact and attractive unit.
However, the bottom line is that you get what you pay for. The Ricoh AP2610 was a fantastic deal -- I got my brand-new unit for $450 after the model was discontinued by Ricoh. (The duplexer was an extra $200.) The AP600N looks to be almost identical to the AP2610, except that it includes a much faster processor (this thing must just scream, the AP2610 is already impressively fast), more memory, USB 2.0, a built-in network card -- and, of course, it's much more expensive than its predecessor.
Given that the difference in price between the AP600N and the HP5100 is *much* smaller than the difference in price between the AP2610 and the HP5100 was, I would have to concur with Karen -- unless you can find some sort of unbelievably fantastic deal on the Ricoh, go for the HP. It's going to be a lot more reliable than the Ricoh.
- Darcy ----- [EMAIL PROTECTED] Brooklyn, NY
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