Ricoh Aficio C242SF review

While many modern MFPs are equipped with colour screens, touch buttons and all manner of shiny bells and whistles, the C242SF keeps it simple with a bright four-line LCD display. It has a slightly clunky menu interface with only limited options, but you can at least scan to a USB flash disk; there are few other extra features, though.

The C242SF supports a direct connection via USB or a network connection over Ethernet. The supplied software CD has quick installation options for both, which default to a PCL6 printer driver and TWAIN scanner driver. If required, you can also install a PostScript 3 printer driver, LAN-Fax utility and a copy of NewSoft’s Presto! PageManager 9 Standard Edition.

Presto! lets you easily organise, OCR and search your scanned documents. It has some useful features, such as the ability to create searchable PDFs, but the version that shipped with our printer doesn’t have the current version’s support for saving your documents to Google Drive or Evernote. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with the upgrade installer from NewSoft’s website, and Ricoh’s own driver download site also shows no sign of the update.

The C242SF is first and foremost built for mono printing, but made decent work of our illustrated colour business documents, despite slightly sluggish colour print speeds. Very small serif fonts of 8pt and below look a little jagged, though. Close examination revealed slightly jagged edges on fonts of up to 14pt when using the default 600dpi and Speed quality setting, but the errors are subtle and the overall appearance of our documents was good. Mono pages printed at a respectable 15.2ppm but colour documents printed at just 4.8ppm and colour duplex at 3.7ppm. We’ve seen better colour printing speeds from inkjets.

You can’t change the printer’s resolution, but there are two higher-quality gradation settings: Standard and Fine. At fine quality, even 5pt fonts looked fairly solid, although some letters looked a touch thin, while standard quality also provides some improvement.

When we tested the MFP’s ability to print photos, we set its gradation to fine. Six 6x4in photos on three A4 pages printed in 3m 17s and looked reasonable. The Aficio’s colour prints aren’t as glossy as those from some lasers but the contrast in our images was excellent. They were a little grainy and red tones were slightly over-emphasised, but we were generally happy with photo quality. The same set of images printer in 1m 25s seconds at the fastest setting, but the resulting images were noticeably grainier. Our 10x8in images printed in 2m 27s, also at fine quality.

Mono and colour photocopies from the flatbed platen took 26s and 29s respectively, but you can add another 10s to that if the scanner hasn’t been used recently. Meanwhile, 20s will be added to any print or copy if the MFP is in sleep mode when you start it. Copy quality is generally good, with sharp text, although colour images are somewhat dominated by red tones while mono copies of colour illustrations look a little dark.

SCANNER

The MFP’s scanner interface looks a bit elderly by the standards of its Epson and Canon rivals, but it’s easy to use and has all the options you’re likely to need. A preview scan took 26s from cold but just 10s if the scanner had been used recently. The general tab lets you select the resolution you wish to scan at, switch between colour and black and white and choose cropping options. An Advanced settings tab allows you to adjust gamma, sharpness, brightness and contrast.

A 150dpi scan of an A4 document took 13s while a 300dpi scan of the same sheet took 17s. The scanner interface remained open and retained previews between scans. A 600dpi scan of a 6x4in photo took 14s and even a 1,200dpi scan took just 25s. Even though scans are so quick, their quality wasn’t bad at all. There wasn’t as much fine detail as you get from more photo-oriented scanners, but contrast between similar tones was reasonably good and colours looked fairly natural. Text on our low-resolution 150dpi scan was clearly legible too.

The MFP costs £368 and comes with 1,000-page starter cartridges. It has fairly low print costs if you buy high-yield 6,500-page black or 6,000-page colour cartridges, which cost £118 for a black cartridge and £123 for each colour cartridge. A mono page works out at 1.8p and a page of mixed colour and black printing at 8.1p. There aren’t many additional consumables, but total cost of ownership for light use is a rather hefty £846 due to the relatively small starter cartridges. However, the MFP is much better value for high-yield users. If you go through 2,000 mono and 1,000 colour pages every month, the TCO is a middling £3,936.

CONCLUSION

The Aficio C242SF’s print quality isn’t the best and colour print speeds are conspicuously slow, but although its interface isn’t exactly bursting with innovation, this is a functional, workmanlike laser MFP that met all of our expectations and is reasonably cost-effective for heavy users. However, if you’re after a workgroup laser MFP, the Xerox WorkCentre 6605DN produces better-looking prints, has a great interface and will cost light users much less to run.