Ricoh SP 5300DN Black and White Laser Printer - Review 2022

Like in features, speed, and chapters options to our Editors' Choice Dell Smart Printer S5830dn, the Ricoh SP 5300DN Black and White Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation Printer ($one,229) is a single-role laser printer designed for medium- to high-volume printing in pocket-sized to midsize offices and workgroups. The Ricoh 5300DN costs a little more than the Dell S5830dn, but it's significantly smaller and lighter and has more expansion options, and information technology costs less to use. On the other hand, during testing, graphics and photo output came out slightly subpar—just enough to keep information technology from receiving our Editors' Pick nod. Not enough, though, to keep the Ricoh 5300DN from being an excellent choice for churning out thousands of documents each calendar month in busy, high-volume settings.

Pocket-sized and Mighty

Measuring thirteen.half-dozen past 16.five past 16.one inches (HWD) and weighing 39.half-dozen pounds, the Ricoh 5300DN is several inches shorter and smaller in depth, and effectually thirteen pounds lighter, than the Dell S5830DN and the Canon ImageClass MF515dw Black and White Laser Printer, making the Ricoh model a lot more than likely to fit comfortably on your desktop. Information technology'due south much closer in size to (but x pounds heavier than) the Xerox VersaLink B400/DN. Fifty-fifty though it's smaller than several competitors, most offices will probably discover it more than suitable to its own shelf or printer stand.

Information technology comes out of the box capable of holding up to 600 sheets of paper, split between a 500-sheet main drawer and a 100-sheet bypass tray. If 600 sheets from ii separate sources aren't plenty, you tin can aggrandize input chapters up to 2,600 sheets by calculation up to four 500-sheet cassettes. The paper drawers cost from $309 to $485, depending on the configuration; some, for instance, are Teflon lined, and others have security locks that disallow adding or changing media without a key. There are as well a few flavors of canister-based cabinet stands available (starting at $195).

The Dell S5830dn's default paper chapters is 50 sheets higher than the Ricoh 5300DN'due south, and its maximum capacity is greater by 1,800 sheets; the Xerox B400/DN holds 100 sheets more than the Ricoh model by default, even so its maximum chapters is 250 sheets less; and the Canon MF515dw as well comes ready to hold 600 sheets, expandable to an underachieving 1,600 sheets. The Ricoh 5300DN'due south maximum monthly duty cycle is 250,000 pages with a recommended monthly volume of xvi,600.

Some other of the Ricoh 5300DN's several other expansion options includes a 350GB difficult drive ($300) for storing documents with Locked, Agree, and Stored status for later retrieval and printing. You tin either purchase the bulldoze and install it yourself, or have a Ricoh technician come out and install it. How much the latter costs depends on who you buy the drive from and who performs the installation. (Some vendors include this in the cost of the bulldoze.) I chose to do the installation myself. If you've ever installed a drive or expansion carte in a PC, installing Ricoh's drive would be a snap. Too, the online instructions are very well-written and well-illustrated, making the process fairly easy.

A small, somewhat rudimentary (compared with competitors) control panel is on the top-right border of the chassis. It consists of a paw full of navigation and office buttons, and a few condition LEDs, anchored by a four-line text-based not-touch on monochrome display. While the panel is fairly straightforward, plain I've become spoiled past today'southward tablet-like displays where you access features via shortcut and app icons. At a couple of points in the testing, I found myself wandering around in the drill-downwardly menus trying to discover specific functions, such every bit, say, locating the unit'due south IP accost. Ricoh does, however, use large, colorful impact screens on some of its printers—with a price tag of well over $1,000, the 5300DN should be 1 of them.

Setting Upward, Connecting Up, and Securing Up

Setting up the Ricoh 5300DN was, for the about role, much like setting up any monochrome laser printer these days, except that I had to remove the toner cartridge from inside the chassis, dabble with a lever, and shake the cartridge to evenly disperse the toner inside; then remount it. I as well had to install a bottle that collects excess toner equally the device prints. It's not that either of these procedures is especially backbreaking or time-consuming, merely nearly all of today'south laser printers don't require any additional treatment beyond loading the paper trays—they are essentially plug-n-play.

The standard connectivity ports are USB and Gigabit Ethernet. Wi-Fi and several other connection types are optional, and some are expensive. The Wi-Fi carte, for instance, lists for $489. In addition to the hard drive and Wi-Fi card, at that place are cards for installing on-board optical grapheme recognition (OCR), an NFC card reader for securing authentication, XPS and PDF printing, adding USB ports for connecting print servers, external drives, and a few other USB options—the list goes on. However, there is simply 1 open interface board slot available, and so you lot must choose among them.

Note that the (separate) USB, PDF, and File Format Converter boards allow support for various file types stored on the HDD, USB pollex drives, and various other USB devices; yous can print all these types of files from your PC without installing any of these add-ons. Mobile connectivity—printing from e-mail, scanning to and printing from cloud sites, and printing from almost anywhere is handled through the gratis Ricoh Connector app.

Many of the security options, including the ability to secure separate jobs via PINs, saving samples, property print jobs for after processing, user authentication and HDD Data Overwrite and Encryption, requires the optional HDD. Security features that don't require the HDD are: Bonjour back up, Windows Active Directory support, standard encryption, password authentication (for restricting admission), Secure Socket Layer (SSL), and a few others.

Fast One- and 2-Sided Printing

As we practice with all printers that default to auto-duplexing (two-sided press), as the Ricoh 5300DN does, in improver to reporting and saving the device's ane-sided print speed, we also clock, report, and archive how fast it churns out two-sided pages. The Ricoh 5300DN printed our merely formatted 12-page Microsoft Word text certificate in duplex mode at the rate of 43.seven images per minute (where each side constitutes an image), which is quite fast. The Dell S5830dn was near 8ipm slower in duplex style, and the Xerox B400/DN came in even lower, by nearly 12ipm. The Canon MF515dn came in a whopping twenty.7ppm nether our Ricoh examination unit.

When press our 12-page text document in simplex fashion, the Ricoh 5300DN churned at 48.9 pages per minute (ppm), about 3ppm lower than its 52ppm rating, whereas the Dell S5830dn was nearly 12.2ppm faster; the Xerox B400/DN managed about 1ppm slower; and the Canon in MF515dn was 8.7ppm behind the Ricoh.

When I combined the results from the unmarried-sided text document test with those from printing our more complex graphics- and photo-laden PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, as almost printers do at this betoken in our tests, the Ricoh 5300DN'due south score plummeted, in this case by about 70 percent, to xv.3ppm. This time, though, the Ricoh machine finished dead terminal, at least 3ppm behind the adjacent slowest model, the Xerox B40/DN, and 8.5ppm behind the Dell S5830dn.

Excellent Text, And so-So Graphics and Photos

Overall, the Ricoh 5300DN prints reasonably well, with crisp, well-shaped, near-typesetter quality text, and better than passable graphics and photographs. Our test fonts held their own, with little-to-no deposition downwards to the everyman fonts nosotros test (4 points), significant that information technology's meliorate than acceptable for all types of business organisation applications, including those in which you're trying to impress an existing or would-be customer. Concern graphics, besides, were well-delineated and easy on the eyes, but they were a footling besides dark, which in turn, compared with competing models, such equally the Dell S5830dn, caused some lack of detail.

It's not that the graphics were not good-looking; the grayscale was just a picayune off and non quite equally bonny as I've seen on several competitors, including the models discussed throughout, only peculiarly compared with several Canon monochrome laser machines, such as the Canon ImageClass MF515dw Black and White Laser Printer. The Ricoh 5300DN's photos, besides, had the aforementioned nighttime pall over them, thereby making them a shade or two under pristine, just still more than acceptable for most business applications—except, perhaps, marketing material. But then you lot probably wouldn't want to use grayscale photos for that, anyway.

Running Costs Tin't Become Much Lower

While there's plenty to like nigh the Ricoh 5300DN, information technology'southward exceptionally loftier-yield (25,000 pages) toner cartridge and low 0.5-cent cost per page make it an exceptional value. It may cost a few hundred dollars more than the other models discussed here, but if you use it to its potential of several 1000 pages per month, you'll become that dorsum in no time. (For every 1-cent difference in the per-page cost of toner, every x,000 pages you impress will save yous $100.) Of the other machines discussed here, the Dell S5830dn'southward i-cent cost per folio is closest to that of the Ricoh 5300DN.

A No-Nonsense Workhorse

The Ricoh SP 5300DN Black and White Laser Printer prints relatively well, and fast, at highly competitive running costs. Its graphics and photo output is not quite as good as nosotros encounter from some of its direct competitors, though. In fact, all three of the other high-volume monochrome laser printers discussed hither, the Dell S5830dn, the Xerox B400/DN, and the Canon MF515dn, all print a little better grayscale graphics and photographs—a toll-versus-output-quality tradeoff that could, if your print volume is high enough, toll you thousands of dollars over the life of the printer. However, the Ricoh 5300DN's loftier price, expensive add-ons (the $500 Wi-Fi module, for example), and slightly subpar graphics and photos are but enough to proceed it from nudging Dell'south S5830dn from its Editors' Option perch for a mid-to-loftier-book monochrome laser printer for minor- and medium-size offices and workgroups.