The printer comes with USB and 10/100

In departmental office environments one of the key requirements is print speed and as printer makers know this it’s one of the main features determining price. As the throughput speed increases the price goes up steeply. Ricoh’s Aficio SP 4100N is a large workgroup or small departmental mono laser with a claimed speed of 31ppm.

The printer has a fairly conventional layout with a large, 500-sheet paper tray at the bottom and a further, 100-sheet multipurpose tray which unclips and folds down from the front panel above. You have to know just where to press it, though, as the click-open, click-closed catch doesn’t respond unless you press directly over it.

The printer’s control panel is remarkably easy to use, as its eight buttons are well labelled in English, rather than relying on sometimes obscure icons and the two-line LCD display is completely horizontal and has a good backlight.

The printer comes with USB and 10/100 Ethernet as standard interfaces and you can add Gigabit networking and Wi-Fi as options. It's a bit surprising that duplex printing isn't included as standard on a machine at this price, but a duplexer is an option, along with two more 500-sheet paper trays, an envelope feeder, a hard drive and extra memory.

A single-piece drum and toner cartridge slides in from the front, once the front panel has been folded down. You shouldn't have to do this often, though, as the standard capacity of the cartridge is 15,000 pages. The maintenance kit, which is needed every 90,000 pages, is the only other consumable.

Software installation is reasonably straightforward, though choosing Quick Install only sets up the PCL 6 driver and the Adobe Postscript Level 3 installation is more fiddly, requiring you to assign a port manually. Since Postscript and PDF support are two important features of the printer, you'd think the driver installation would be included in the Quick Install Wizard.
The driver itself includes support for up to 16 pages per sheet, watermarks and user code entry, so only those with valid authority can print to the machine. There's no facility for walk-up printing from a USB stick, though, which is becoming an increasingly common feature. Read More

The ST in the product name stands for short throw

No matter how good or huge a TV gets (and as the 103in Panasonic TH-103PF9 proved, TVs get pretty big), they still can't match projectors for giving that immersive, cinema experience. Better still, unlike a real cinema, you don't have screaming kids or mumbling wanna-be-film-critics in your own living room - or at the very least it's much easier to remove them. However, the downside is that to get a projector as good as even a reasonable HDTV, you generally have to spend a significant amount of money.

Even such devices as the sub-£1000 Full HD InFocus X10 still aren't what you could call cheap; ludicrously good value for money, maybe, but cheap, no. However, not everyone is looking for a high definition setup, not having (or even wanting) an HD source to feed to it.

That isn't to say, however, that these consumers don't want the big screen experience. BenQ, the savvy company it is, knows that this audience is pretty large and is targeting it with the MP512 ST projector. Even just going by sales of the Wii, there are some four million (says VGChartz) owners out there, not to mention the countless Sky (SD) subscribers, Freeview watchers and… you get the idea. The point is, there's a big market for a standard definition projector offering above average performance at a better than average price.

The ST in the product name stands for short throw - this is important because it means the MP512 can sit on a coffee table, a relatively short distance from the surface it is projecting on. In my own living room, I had the projector maybe 1.5m away from the wall, and still had a 60in image - Wii Sports has never looked so good.

As already pointed out, the MP512 is only a standard definition projector, with an 800 x 600 resolution to be precise. Despite that, it still goes so far as to sport an HDMI port, which will even accept a 1080p signal - which the projector then downscales. When inputting a 16:9 signal, there are obviously going to be black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, but the projector is bright enough, at a quoted 2,200 ANSI lumens, for that not to be an issue. Yes these bars are noticeable, but not distractingly so.

As well as HDMI, there is a VGA connector, for hooking up a PC or laptop (with the maximum input resolution accepted being 1,280 x 1,024, downscaled), an S-Video input, a composite port and a 3.5mm jack for audio input. That latter input should be avoided like the plague and investing in a pair of dedicated speakers, even something as cheap as the GigaWorks T20s should be a top priority for anyone thinking of buying the MP512 - or any projector for that matter. Even BenQ seems to agree, because neither the remote, nor the projector's top-mounted controls offer a volume function. Read More