The Ricoh 132 P ($237) mono laser printer is a bit of an anomaly. Many of its similarly priced competitors—including the Canon ImageClass LBP246dw, the Brother HL-L6210DW, and the Lexmark MS431dw—offer faster speeds, higher paper capacities, and a lower cost per page. The 132 P's main advantage is a 1,200-by-1,200dpi resolution setting that delivers top-tier quality for line drawings and text as small as 4 points. So although its speed, paper capacity, and running cost limit it to relatively light-duty printing, it can be a compelling choice for a small office or workgroup that also needs top quality for small fonts or complex line drawings.

Design: A Familiar Mono-Laser Format

The 132 P weighs a relatively heavy 28.7 pounds and measures 10.3 by 14.6 by 15.4 inches (HWD), making it the heaviest of the printers mentioned above, and hefty enough that you may want help unboxing it. However, physical setup is both typical for a mono laser, and easy. Simply remove the packing materials, including from the toner cartridge that ships inside the unit, slide the cartridge back into the printer, and connect the power cord.

Paper handling is suitable for most small offices or workgroups. The base unit offers a 300-sheet capacity, divided into a 250-sheet drawer and a 50-sheet multi-purpose tray, plus automatic duplexing (two-sided printing). You can also add a second 250-sheet drawer ($187), for a maximum of 550 sheets. If you want to keep refills down to roughly once a week, that translates to printing up to about 2,200 pages per month if you get the optional extra drawer, or an average of 110 pages per working day. If you stay with the base unit, it works out to 60 pages per day. Ricoh pegs the recommended duty cycle at 1,500 pages per month.

(Credit: Ricoh)

For driver installation, you have to go to Ricoh's website and either download individual drivers or the full installation package, which handles most of the setup automatically. For my tests, I used it to install the PCL6 driver, though you can tell it to install a PostScript 3 driver instead, if your office needs it, or install both.

Connection options include Ethernet and USB. You can also add Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi Direct with an optional dongle ($44), but note that you don't need one for mobile printing. The 132 P lets you print from Android and iOS devices via either Wi-Fi Direct or a Wi-Fi connection to the same network the printer is using. You'll also notice an NFC logo on the top panel near the front, but it's not for establishing a connection to a mobile device, and Ricoh says the version of the printer meant for small offices doesn't support NFC at all. It's needed because NFC verification could be added in a variation meant for enterprise-level small workgroups.

(Credit: Ricoh)

The cost per page is a little high, at 3.5 cents, but, as always, the more important issue when making comparisons is the total cost of ownership, which we discuss in How to Save Money on Your Next Printer. Also note that the 132 P's toner cartridge includes the drum, so for printers that don't combine the toner and drum in the same cartridge, you'll need to add in the comparison printer's cost per page for the drum unit as well.

One welcome extra for the 132 P is an option in the driver for private printing, which lets you send a file to the printer, but not print it until you enter a PIN at the front panel. For shared printers that are even a short walk from your desk, this avoids the possibility of someone finding sensitive information sitting in the output tray before you retrieve the pages.

Testing the Ricoh 132 P: Top-Tier Text Quality

To judge the 132 P's performance, I compared it with the three other printers mentioned above. All were tested using our standard Windows testbed and all were connected by Ethernet.

For simplex (one-sided) printing of our 12-page Word file, the results for the printers were consistent with their rated speeds, which vary from a high of 50 pages per minute (ppm) for the HL-L6210DW to a low of 34ppm for the 132 P. As is typical, the measured ppm for pages two through 12 was a match for the rating in each case, within the range of a rounding error. So although the 132 P lives up to its rating, and the measured 33ppm is a respectable clip, it's the slowest in this group. In addition, its first-page-out (FPO) time was slower compared with the others, so it will be in last place among this crowd no matter how many pages are in a document.

For the full 12 pages (including the first page), we observed only a 3-second difference from fastest to slowest for the other three printers, while the 132 P came in at 9 seconds behind third place. That won't be enough to matter if the printer's far enough away that you have to walk to it. But the difference will only increase with each additional page, so if you print a lot of files that are tens or hundreds of pages long, you may consider the speed an issue. Note also that because the FPO time is 12 seconds, compared with 7 and 8 seconds for the other printers, you may notice a difference in speed if you regularly print several short files in quick succession.

For our full business-applications suite, which consists of six files, the 132 P took roughly 40 seconds longer than the other printers to print the entire suite, coming in at 102 seconds (15 ppm overall) compared with a little more than a minute for each of the others.

For duplex (two-sided) printing of the Word file, the relative speeds for the printers were a little different, but here again, the 132 P finished in last place.

On our photo test suite, it averaged 9 seconds for a 4-by-6-inch photo.

The good news for the 132 P is that whatever points it loses for the relatively slow speed, it makes up for on output quality, particularly for text. Using its default 600-by-600dpi setting, all of the fonts you'd likely use in a business document were highly readable and well-formed at 5 points, and all were readable at 4 points, although the strokes on some were a little thin at the smaller size, making them a little harder to read. In addition, one of the two heavily stylized fonts with thick strokes was easily readable at 5 points, while the one that's harder to render well was easily readable at 10 points. Switching to 1,200-by-1,200dpi maintained essentially the same level of readability for the fonts with thick strokes, while making all the fonts in the first group highly readable and well-formed at 4 points.

Graphics at the default resolution were easily good enough to convey all the information they were meant to, but a step below top-tier for a mono laser. I saw easily visible dithering patterns in solid fills, obvious posterization in one gradient that's hard to render well, relatively subtle banding, and uneven pile height in black fills, which shows as uneven reflection of light from certain angles. A one-pixel-wide line on a black background held, but barely, turning into a dashed line over part of its length and becoming hard to see in other parts. Printing at 1200-by-1200dpi reduced banding and dithering significantly, to the point of not being able to see either on some output, but it also made the thin line on a black background harder to see.

(Credit: Ricoh)

Photos at the default 600-by-600dpi showed similar levels of banding and dithering plus some minor posterization and a slight darkening that lost some shadow detail. Overall they were pretty much what you would expect from a 1990s black-and-white newspaper photo. Using 1,200-by-1,200dpi made almost all of the banding, dithering patterns, and posterization disappear, boosting the photos to a bit better than newspaper quality.

Verdict: Quality Over Quantity

The ideal home for the Ricoh 132 P would be in an office that absolutely needs the printer's high-quality output and also prints little enough that the paper capacity is suitable and the relatively high cost per page won't lead to an overwhelmingly higher total cost of ownership compared with the other models mentioned in this review.

However, if you print enough to need a higher paper capacity, you should consider those alternatives. The Brother HL-6210DW can handle the heaviest-duty workload, at a maximum 1,600 sheets, while the Lexmark MS431dw and Canon LBP246dw both max out at 900 sheets. The Brother printer also offers the lowest cost per page, followed by the Lexmark and then Canon models.

Ultimately, if the Ricoh 132 P can handle your workload, its low initial price will at least partly make up for its higher cost per page, and the high-quality output can make the higher running cost worth paying for.