Canon 7000

[digital user]

We've had a 7000VP installed since last August. It replaced an original NexPress. The amount of downtime we're experiencing is unacceptable. Canon tells us that the engine is designed for a maximum of 300,000 8.5 x 11 sides per month. We exceed that. Have had ongoing problems with yellow unit resulting in downtime / bad quality. Our impressions between maintenance calls is between 20,000 and 30,000. Is our experience common?

Edited by: Eric Delzer on Apr 17, 2008 5:58 PM

[lebox97]

that seems pretty low.
- when you say "canon" do you mean the local dealer?

Make sure you get Canon (manufacturer) service engineers involved.

[Gemon]

Yep, thats about right. I have 2 of them and my experience is that we have an engineer in every day and on the occassions that the engineer does not come in we have toner drops on the sheet or fading on the edges of the sheet.

[Craig]

Trust me when I say this. I feel (or have felt) your pain!

I went through this with a CLC4000 for 3 years, at one point I had 2 different regional service techs in from Chicago and they were worthless! I even had conversations with Janet Cain and her reply was get a 7000! After 12 years and 7 Canon machines I have turned away from the dark side and own a Xerox DC8000AP and will NEVER go back to Canon! The service and support is impeccable, just yesterday I called my tech. only to see how he was doing, since I have not seen him in a month! With Canon I had service in my shop on average 2 to 3 times a week!

Good luck, I hope you have better results than I had with Canon, mine was almost turned over to our lawyers before if was finished.

Edited by: Craig Hofer on Apr 23, 2008 6:32 AM

[jlind]

Eric:
What made you choose a Cannon over the NexPress? I thought the samples that they were printing at Graph Expo looked pretty good, and the price was attractive. However, aside from selling more color copiers than anyone else, they were not in the pantheon of iGen, Indigo, and NexPress. It appears that the hardest element to determine, before purchase, is "up time" of the machine. Like the early Indigo's, perhaps they should sell you two of them. Another forum you might want to check out for digital is DICE. Maybe there's some relief there...
John Lind
Cranberry Township, PA
724-776-4718

[Dave Lambert]

I purchased a Canon C7000 3 weeks ago, so far we've run approx 80k on it. We are getting our "training" on how to run it tomorrow and Thursday. So far it's been pretty good to us considering we've had no training. The service reps really need to be better trained, for the couple of problems we've had the come in scratch their heads and start making phone calls. They don't seem to have a clue about this machine.
I must say I'm very impressed with the quality, our clients like it much more than the IGen3 output. The booklet maker is a great addition, too bad it doesn't have a 3 side trim only the lead edge. I'm also waiting on the release of the perfect binding attachment. I'm hoping we can push it past the 300k duty cycle without the issues I'm reading about...time will tell. So far I'm very happy with the printer...service will have to get up to snuff.

[FasterMD]

We've had our Canon 7000 for less than 7 months.

In that time we've experienced and learned quite a bit about our machine:
1. Getting consistent reliable color from one day to the next is impossible, regardless how many times you calibrate the machine. Having a machine operator who knows how to compensate for this is mandatory.
2. The machines are extremely good and consistent.....when they want to be. We've had runs of +10,000 impressions with full coverage 12 x 18 4/4 where it never had a single problem.
3. When it comes to solid colors the machines are incredible.....when they want to be.
4. The machines need to be in a tightly controlled environment. Our shop is cold and dry one day, hot and humid the next. Trying to keep color consistency with these new machines requires consistent atmosphere.
5. Due to poor sales our machines are not being used anywhere near capacity. That being said we see our techs at least twice a week. We do not consider this acceptable. Most of the time the machine is being called in for quality issues. My belief is that a majority of these problems are a result of the environment and a general lack of training of our operator. Until I see our machine in a stable environment with a trained operator, it's hard to say what the causes are for our problems.
6. Setting the paper catalog settings correctly for your stocks is extremely important for quality.

Eric, you are not alone in your frustrations.

[yogesh]

we have installed last year machine is already done more than 300000 copies and its doing extremly well,we are very happy with the performance of the machine

[yogesh]

I have been in the printing industry from past 25 years, the first color print engine I have used CLC series .my customer were very happy in quality of printing and color gamut handling, when market demands high end print engine,

I have tried many venders print engine. I had bitter experience in color consistence and color gamut handling, engine life deigns & break downs? I have lost my clientless

Now I had brought 5 “Canon C7000vp print engines. ” I had already printed 30 million impressions. I can compete with offset print industry and photo print industry in term of quality and color consistence. People are come back with confidence. That my profit.

[Craig]

Something doesn't add up with that post! ?:| If I did the math correctly all 5 7000's would have to have run for over 1,400 hours to achieve that, if you only ran letter size paper simplexed. I may be wrong but the release date in the US was late September-ish. That would mean if all 5 machines were installed at the same time they would have to have run for 8 hours a day non-stop for 175 days to get that yield. I doubt ANY brand can run that long, everyone needs down time for PM's. Not to mention each Imagepress would have to run 857,142 impressions a month, almost 3 times the recommended monthly duty cycle.

Sounds like a lot to ask for a mid-volume machine, maybe an iGen or Nexpress could get those volumes, my DocuColor 8000AP is faster then the Imagepress, and I don't think it would come close to doing that volume on a month to month basis. If your numbers are correct, you can be thankful you have redundancy cause you'll be crashing one of them soon. If they are anything like my old CLC's when they hit the wall they were down for several day's at a time.