Ricoh and Xerox deliver fast color in a big way

Ricoh’s consumables, however, are a bargain. After 50,000 prints (about a year’s worth), you’ll have spent $1,039 to keep your Ricoh CL7300D humming (not including paper or electricity), compared with $1,520 for the Xerox Phaser 7400DN; after 250,000 prints, the Ricoh bill will amount to $7,639 -- $10,215 for the Xerox. By that time, you’ll have long recuperated the higher purchase price. For my calculations, consumables costs reflect a running total of all purchases of replacement components at specific break points. They are not based on a generalized cost per page.

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Note that pricing for Ricoh products is not entirely transparent because the company sells through a dealer network and often under a monthly contract that includes supplies. You may be able to negotiate better deals than the list prices quoted here.

Xerox Phaser 7400DN
The 7400DN shows some nice design touches. One of my favorites is the hinged control panel, which swivels from horizontal to vertical to accommodate tall and short people. The controller cover is also on hinges; you loosen two captive thumbscrews, and the door folds out of your way. A bracket over the output tray keeps prints in place if you open the case to clear a paper jam.

All the flaps and doors are labeled to match illustrations in the maintenance documentation. The external auxiliary feed and the main paper tray both feel fairly sturdy, but the size guides on it are somewhat balky. A slot on the tray holds reusable plastic size labels, which Xerox provides.

The LED-array design hangs the light sources from the ceiling of the printer’s paper path, so that opening the lid lifts much of the innards out of your way. And a cage that holds the drums and toner cartridges can raise a couple of inches to allow you to access paper jams at the image transfer belt without gutting the whole printer.

Xerox made the 7400DN friendly for users and system admins alike. A big backlit LCD displays six lines of text and takes advantage of the real estate to show prompts and menu paths. Users can also print some help files that are stored permanently on the printer, such as tutorials on color calibration and paper types. Extensive on-screen manuals fill in for brief, oversimplified printed documentation.

One minor UI flaw: The installation CD includes a useful tool called SupportCentre that displays video tutorials, FAQs, manuals, and so on, but it isn’t documented in the install guide; I just stumbled upon it by luck.

As an admin, if you already use Xerox CentreWare for managing a fleet of Xerox printers, the Phaser 7400DN will drop right into place; if not, an internal Web site provides a wealth of security and admin features, including a job-accounting database and fine-grained control over which control-panel features to lock or leave accessible. You can set the printer to sleep and wake up at specific times each day or tell it to track its own usage patterns and figure out the most efficient schedule.

Print quality is where the Xerox stumbles, and there only a bit. It prints text in an attractive solid black, but with a hint of soft focus or fuzziness. At the same time, the curves and diagonals of letters show a slight choppiness, although serifs and other details come through well. Color ramps show slight crosshatching but transition smoothly from light to dark shades; however, diagonal lines look wavy because they are not cleanly defined. Also, in my tests, I noticed some trapping problems that left blank spaces between abutting blocks of solid color. My grayscale test photo seemed tonally flat and had moire patterns but preserved fine detail, while my color test photo looked dotty and lacked detail.

Xerox’s Phaser 7400DN fits into this competitive environment at the low end of the cost spectrum: Its $3,349 price tag ($4,347 fully configured) undersells not only Ricoh’s CL7300D but also the Lexmark C920dn and Oki C9600hdn, equivalently equipped models from our Oct. 3 review. And although Ricoh’s consumables cost much less over time, Lexmark’s and Oki’s cost somewhat more.

Xerox, however, doesn’t compensate by delivering an underperforming machine. Its 27.4-ppm text-printing speed beats both the Ricoh and Lexmark, although not the Oki; its 8.5-ppm graphics-printing speed takes first place.

Which big printer for you?
Either printer is a fine machine but a big investment, and the differences between them are subtle. The Xerox Phaser 7400DN performs somewhat better, especially on graphics, whereas the Ricoh Aficio CL7300D has a slight edge on print quality. The Xerox costs less to purchase, but its operating costs add up faster. If purchase cost matters more than speed, look at Ricoh’s slightly slower and much less expensive Aficio CL7200.

The PC World Test Center contributed methodology, staff, and resources to this project.