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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.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS