Laser printer Ricoh SP 150SUw – performance & specs

Ricoh tends to focus on the corporate market these days, producing high-performance laser printers for office use. However, its new range of SP 150 is a bit more modest, and is aimed at home users or small businesses that simply need a fast, high quality laser printer for black and white documents.

The print quality is more than good – as you would expect from a laser printer – with its 600dpi resolution producing soft and finely detailed text. But it is the speed of SP 150SUw that gives you an advantage over a normal inkjet printer. In our review with a series of Word and PDF documents, the SP 150SUw quietly and quickly turned 20 pages per minute-only slightly below Ricoh’s 22ppm color speed. This is well beyond the speed of most inkjet printers in this price range, so the SP 150SUw will gain your livelihood if you regularly need to print text documents.

The print and copier functions are only black and white, but the 1200dpi scanner can scan in color, so you have the ability to scan photos and other color documents that you can email to other people, or edit on your PC or Mac.

The 150SUw SP comes with a standard sized toner cartridge that should last about 700 pages, and Ricoh points out that its cartridges do not require a separate drum mechanism that needs to be replaced every few years (as is the case with some printers Laser). The replacements are £65.16 for the standard toner capacity, or £91.39 for a high-performance cartridge that provides 1500 pages.

Those prices run on a fairly exorbitant 9.3 p per page for the standard and 6p cartridge for the high-performance cartridge. The good news is that you can find the cartridges at lower prices online if you hunt around-about £35 and £50 respectively-which brings prices up to 5p and 3.3 p respectively, but it’s just that the last option with high performance cartridges that makes the cost of O Low enough to recommend.

The installation is very simple, since the only black toner cartridge is already in place inside the printer, and there are the drivers provided on a disk for Windows, Mac and Linux. Ricoh also includes a handy control panel application that provides quick and easy access to the main settings for printing, copying and scanning, and there are applications for Android and IOS devices available as well.

Laser printer Ricoh SP 150SUw- Specs:

600dpi copier and 1200dpi colour scanner
A4 mono multi-function laser printer with 600dpi resolution
Paper input tray – 50 sheets A4
Paper output tray – N/A
Dimensions – 350 x 275 x 137 mm
Weight – 7.5kg

The Ricoh SP 150SUw is a compact and multifunctional laser printer that offers excellent performance and quality for homes or small offices requiring only direct black and white printing. The original purchase price is certainly competitive for a fast printer, but the toner is expensive if you pay the recommended prices of Ricoh. Luckily, you can find discounts on high performance cartridges if you look around online.