DSF

Agreed galerion. I would be interested in a very high quality A4 printer, but there is nothing that would convince me to buy this printer. I've never owned a Ricoh, but am I right in stating that it could only print pinky reds and had a rubbish colour space? Correcting these reds doesn't make it HD, but acceptable. Try putting refill carts in that printer!

my thoughts on this were...
Sawgrass can get a better price on buying printers from Ricoh if they are unbranded and then rebadged as Sawgrass. Ricoh can then wash their hands of having to deal with disgruntled customers, as Sawgrass take on all the end customer support. I would guess Ricoh are a bit fed up with having to deal with Sawgrass customers, even if it just wasting their customer support time referring people back to Sawgrass, and so will be more than happy to move to this new model, and Sawgrass get to spin it as having their own printer.

oh, yeah, my other thought was that this also may have a bit of firmware tweaking and new chips on the carts to block use of non-Sawgrass carts

I think Ricoh have tended to invite people to jog on rather than refer them back to Sawgrass when problems have arisen! However, my understanding is that this is very much a friendly venture. Ricoh and Sawgrass have been in open dialogue behind the scenes the whole time, who do think supplied SG with machines to test before they came to market? Ricoh of course. On a side note, I may be wrong but I think the A3 model may be able to print A3+ out of the box. But don't quote me on that...