Ricoh G700, G500 User Manual

THE RICOH AFICIO G700 & G500

G700 & G500

HYBRID COLOR PRINTER

Competitive Analysis

featuring

Ricoh Aficio G700 & G500

Entry-level Color Printers for Business

technology

the fast, affordable printing innovation for business color users

AFICIO G700 & G500

This guide is intended solely for the use and information of Ricoh Corporation, its designated
agents, and their employees. The information in this guide was obtained from several different
sources that are deemed reliable by all industry standards. To the best of our knowledge, this
information is accurate in all respects. However, neither Ricoh Corporation nor any of its agents
or employees shall be responsible for any inaccuracies contained herein.

© 2005, Ricoh Corporation
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

The G700 and G500 represent a new class of color printer from Ricoh. In fact, GelSprinter technology
is so new that it falls into a small but growing product category called Business Inkjet. Currently only
Hewlett-Packard and Canon offer color inkjet models that can be classified as Business Inkjet (BIJ)
printers, and Canon’s latest models are not yet available here in the United States. But with the
success HP is experiencing with them here and Canon’s positive results from abroad, industry analysts
like IDC expect this new breed of inkjet to take significant market share away from conventional
personal/home inkjet printers as well as low-end color laser beam printers.

Business Inkjet printers like the G700 and G500 are hybrids; they take the best characteristics of
typical inkjet printers and combine them with the advantages of color laser technology. From the inkjet
side of the family, Business Inkjet printers inherit individual liquid ink cartridges, a low hardware

acquisition price, low power consumption with fast warm-up times, a small footprint, and simple
end-user maintenance tasks. From the color laser side, Business Inkjet printers are heir to faster
speeds, greater paper capacities, higher duty cycles, low cost-per-page factors, high-resolution
plain paper printing, duplexing, and Ethernet 100Base-TX/10Base-TX network connectivity.

The G700 & G500 Business Inkjet printers overcome the shortcomings of typical inkjet models by:

• Eliminating expensive cartridges that require the print head be replaced each time an ink color is
depleted. Users only replace inks as needed, not print heads.

• Printing on plain paper instead of special, more expensive stocks to maximize image quality.

• Enabling duplex printing at the small workgroup/SOHO level. Dye-based inks simply do not dry

fast enough to permit duplexing.

• Offering higher capacity paper supplies to meet rising volumes in business environments instead
of 50-sheet vertical paper feed trays that require constant attention and replenishing.

• Allowing multiple users to share access to the printer through optional network connectivity.
Typical inkjet printers usually support only local interfaces for peer-to-peer printing.

• Supporting volumes in the thousands of pages per month as opposed to the hundreds of pages
per month common to office superstore models.

• Producing full-color output at speeds equal to monochrome, and at many times the overall
output speed of older conventional inkjet printers.

The G700/G500 Business Inkjet printers overcome the shortcomings of desktop color laser models by:

• Speeding document production by eliminating the need for fusing, and the warm-up times and
excessive power consumption that accompanies the need for high temperatures.

• Putting full-color printing within easy reach of the small business owner. GelSprinter technology is
hundreds if not thousands of dollars less than comparable color laser beam printers.

• Reducing the cost of color through the use of Ricoh’s innovative Level Color Mode to provide

full-color prints at a cost equal to that of monochrome pages.

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AFICIO G700 & G500

How do the G700 and G500 do it? The credit goes primarily to three core technologies:

• These printers use new formula of Viscous Inks that begin to dry immediately upon contact with
the air. This limits dot spreading and prevents ink bleed-through. Viscous inks resist smudging, will
not dissolve upon accidental contact with water, and resist fading when exposed to sunlight. As a
result, the G700/G500 are capable of delivering high-resolution two-sided prints at fast speeds on
plain paper without smearing the first side when the duplex rollers invert each page.

• Extra wide print heads that enable the G700/G500 to print multiple lines per pass across each
page, increasing speeds, reducing wear and tear, and supporting true business volumes.

• Complete support for every sheet of paper as it travels through the paper path resting on a Belt
Transfer System. This ensures proper registration, maintains a uniform distance between paper and

print heads, and minimizes paper jams.

In truth, there aren’t many other Business Inkjet printers to compete against—the category is simply
too new. The following pages will review how Ricoh’s new printers stack up against the leading BIJ
models from HP, as well as a representative of color laser and typical inkjet printers. Please note that
speed and CPP can vary greatly with inkjet printers as a function of the selected print mode/
resolution, image patterns, and page coverage.

Note: This information has been compiled from several sources including BLI Specification Guides, product
brochures, and data gathered from manufacturer Websites. Some discrepancies were found.This document
represents a compilation of these sources to the best of Ricoh’s ability. Please test any performance claims
against a specific competitor using identical file/job parameters to gauge true performance in the customer
environment before making any claims of superiority.

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Hewlett-Packard Business Inkjet 1200 Printer Series

The recently introduced BIJ 1200 family replaces HP’s initial
Business Inkjet offering, the BIJ 1100 Series. Recognizing the
potential for a low cost “business class” inkjet solution, HP was
quick to update the 1100 Series with a more powerful controller,
increased RAM, and faster speeds while maintaining the same

duplexing. This printer is also available in dn, dtn, and dtwn configurations:

1200d $199 Non-networked, Standard Duplex
1200dn $249 Networked (wired)
1200dtn $299 Networked (wired)+ 250-sheet Paper Tray 2
1200dtwn $349 Networked (wired + wireless) + 250-sheet Paper Tray 2

Like these models, the HP BIJ 1200 is based on separate print cartridge and print head design. On
paper the HP Business Inkjet 1200 Series has several specification advantages over the G500, as
shown in the chart. These include:

• Lower SRP

• Faster Full-color and Black-and-white output speeds with higher interpolated resolution

• Higher maximum monthly volume rating with higher print cartridge yields

• Greater amounts of RAM and a faster CPU with optional hard-wired or wireless connectivity

• Printing onto banner paper up to 19 feet long

• Support for Macintosh computers

• Standard duplexing (up to 8.5” x 11”, equal to maximum duplex size)

The G500 has some specification advantages of its own, including a larger standard paper supply and
the availability of a single sheet bypass to process heavyweight stocks. But that’s not where the battle
will be won.

The BIJ 1200 Series uses pigment-based ink for black, but dye-based inks for the cyan, magenta, and
yellow colors. The price of each print cartridge on the HP website is $33.99—comparable to the print
cartridge pricing at $32 for Black, $31 for Cyan, and $36 for Magenta and Yellow (although yields are
not equivalent). However, these print heads are designed to last for the life of the printer and never
need replacement. HP publishes a life of 16,000 pages for the Black print head, and 24,000 pages
for each of C/M/Y print head. Replacement print heads for the BIJ 1200 are also available through
the HP website at $33.99 each, which means the customer will incur much higher out-of-pocket
expenses for HP technology over the life of the printer.

$199 SRP for the non-networked basic version with standard

As reviewed in the Sales Information Guide, dye-based inks are prone to smudging and bleeding, take
longer to dry, and are therefore not recommended for two-sided printing applications. The printers’
Viscous Inks are fast drying and specifically designed to meet business user needs for duplexing at
high speed. The use of dye-based inks calls into question the full-color duplex print quality on the BIJ
1200 Series. Also, ask your customer to closely examine high image coverage prints. Is the paper
wavy from ink over-saturation? Does ink bleed through to the rear side of the paper? Is registration
accurate? When selling against the HP BIJ 1200 Series, it will hard to compete on price, especially
against the d and dtn models—you’ll have to attack image quality and the high cost of consumables.

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