Ricoh G500
A name that turns up on gel-ink cartridges, transfer-paper forums, and a handful of dead-end camera threads - and nowhere else with any certainty.
Overview
The archive can't say for sure what the Ricoh G500 is. The name shows up in two unrelated places, and neither gives a clean answer. On the printer side, the G500 appears as a gel-ink machine: "Ricoh G500" in a T-Shirt Forums discussion, "Ricoh Aficio G-500" and "Aficio Ricoh G500 printer" in a user-manual PDF. Consumable listings consistently pair it with a sibling model, the G700. On the camera side, three Reddit thread titles reference a "Ricoh G 500" fitted with a "Canon wide attachment .46." Those threads have no accessible body text, so no lens, film format, year, or price could be pulled from them. Nothing in the research confirms a G500 camera beyond those titles.
The brand catalog here is otherwise all cameras, so it would be easy to slot the G500 in beside the AF-60S and the RZ-800 and call it a compact. The sources don't support that. They do support a pigment-ink printer that owners used for heat-transfer work, sold alongside the G700 and fed by a family of gel-ink cartridges. The "Aficio" naming and "GelSprinter" references in the manual PDF point to a printer line, not a photographic one. The camera angle is unresolved, not confirmed.
The ink is the part that can be said with some confidence. Owners report the G500 ran pigment inks. One T-Shirt Forums user, who owned the machine a few years back, described them as "very good in terms of wash durability" when paired with a decent transfer paper. That matters if you were pressing shirts rather than printing documents. The same owner flagged the catch: like Epson's OEM pigment inks, the G500's output "will shift slightly to yellow when heat pressed."
Key Features
Pigment Ink, Gel-Printer Family
The G500 is described in the context of gel-ink printing. The T-Shirt Forums thread sits under a "Ricoh Gel (Laser?) Printer 3110DN" heading, and the consumable sellers list "Gel Ink Cartridge" stock for the model. According to owner reports the ink is pigment-based, which is what gives the prints their wash durability on transfer paper. The "Aficio" branding in the manual PDF and "GelSprinter" references elsewhere place the G500 inside a broader Ricoh printer family.
Transfer-Paper Compatibility
The point of these machines, for the people who used them, was heat-press transfer printing. Owners report the G500 worked with transfer paper and produced prints that held up in the wash. The catch was that heat pressing pushed the colors slightly toward yellow. That shift is a known behavior of OEM pigment inks, not a defect unique to this model, but it's worth knowing before committing a design to a run of shirts.
Genuine Magenta Cartridge, Part 402282
The magenta consumable carries part number 402282 and is sold as a genuine/original ink - "Tusze oryginalne" in the Polish listing. Yield figures disagree between sellers: one lists 1100 copies, another lists 1000 pages for the same code. The cartridge carries a 24-month warranty per the Ceneo listing, and current pricing runs around £37.00 plus VAT from a UK consumables seller. Buyers chasing a G500 today are almost certainly chasing this cartridge, not the printer.
Black Cartridge and the G700 Overlap
A high-capacity black cartridge is listed at 2900 pages at 5% coverage, genuine, with the alternate code Ricoh 402280. But that listing sits on a page tagged for the G700 and lists the part under both "Ricoh G500" and "Ricoh G700." Attribution is ambiguous, so the 2900-page figure is a shared-family number, not a G500-specific one. Shipping weight for the consumable is given as 120 g in a 10 × 15 × 3 cm box.
The Unresolved Camera Question
Three Reddit thread titles mention a "Ricoh G 500" with a Canon wide attachment .46, which reads like a film camera with a wide converter. No body text was retrievable from any of them, so there is no lens specification, no film format, no production year, and no price to report. The G500 name may have been used for both a printer and a camera. It's equally possible the camera references are a different product entirely.
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