Ricoh's Gelsprinter technology is designed to produce speeds comparable with laser printers, but with the colour range of inkjets. The gel ink is actually still liquid, but more viscous than in a conventional inkjet printer, as you might buy from HP.

HP is a good name to mention here, as it's the main competitor for Ricoh in this office inkjet market. An all-in-one such as the OfficeJet Pro 8500, while costing £50 more, offers many of the same features, including high-capacity ink cartridges and fast print speeds.

The Aficio GX3000S is styled more like an office laser printer, with a large footprint and a tall profile. It's hard to see why it's quite so tall, given that its A4 flatbed scanner has no Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and that it has a much less bulky mechanism than most lasers.

There's a 250-sheet paper tray at the bottom of the machine and each page makes a 180-degree turn during printing and ends up on an extending support, which slides out from above the tray. Extra trays are available as options to increase the versatility of the machine, but it's a shame there's no multipurpose tray, even for single sheets, as standard.

Get the latest Dell Coupons and other computer coupons at CheapStingyBargains.com.

The only connection is a USB port at the rear, though again the machine can be extended with the addition of an optional Ethernet adapter. The only consumables are four high capacity ink tanks, which slide in behind a cover to the right of the paper tray. The black ink is rated at 1,500 pages and each of the three colours at 1,000 pages.

Ricoh claims the Aficio GX3000S can print 29 pages per minute, but we saw barely a third of this in our tests. The fastest speed we could get from the machine, 10.2ppm, was for our 20-page text document, while the five-page text and colour graphics job dropped this to 7.7ppm.

Where the machine did better than most was in printing duplex. Most inkjets have to wait between printing the first and second sides, to allow the ink to dry. This didn't happen with the Ricoh machine and it completed a 20-side document in two minutes and 23 seconds.

Print quality is not all it could be, with - surprisingly - quite a bit of spikiness to text characters, indicating that the ink has run along the paper fibres. Colour prints are better and a photo print on glossy paper is very passable, though you have to put the photo paper in the main tray.

The ink cartridge prices gives a cost per page of 1.9p for black print and 10.9p for colour. While the black print cost is fine, the colour one is definitely on the high side.

Although at first sight this business gel printer appears inexpensive, quite a few near-essentials are missing. Without a multipurpose tray or Ethernet port, its business applications may be limited. It's also not that cheap to run and, while quick in inkjet terms, is up against stiff opposition from budget colour lasers.