Printer recommendation - 500k B&W impressions per month

[scotsman60]

If you want to go cheap, I can highly recommend the HP4350 laser printer. You can pick them up for under $400 a pop on eBay with less than 100k impressions. They process 55 PPM simplex and are very robust. Pick up a 1500 sheet feeder and the 500 sheet output stacker for another $300 - they are worth it.

There are a ton of replacement parts on the web for these printers, lots of info to help you out using Google.

I've been running 400k pieces a month using two of them for the last six months. My printing uses about 4.7% page coverage so I get around 22,000 pages per toner cartridge. I found a really good online toner supplier that ships me the cartridgesd for $40 a pop - free delivery. I have about one cartrige fail out of every ten and they always replace with a new one.

My per page cost is around 0.003 - including the cost of the printer, toner and fuser replacement every 220,000 impressions. At $400 per printer, they're more or less throw away so click charges aren't worthwhile in this case. The first one I bought had 82,000 impressions when I received it and it ow has over 3,000,000 and is going just as strong as the day I bought it... (There is a known issues wth the fuser drive gear that you may have ot ifx - the part is $10 andtakes about an hour to install)

I use Word and Excel - Word mail merge is pretty good and my runs are usually from 2,500 to 10,000 pieces so this solution works well. I generate a raw printer file from the mail merge and then use a simple Print File utility to spool to the printers.

The only downside to the 4350 is its duplex speed. You can pick up duplexer attachments for <$100 but the print speed drops dramatically. For legal size paper, it drops to 11 PPM. This was what caused me to go to a production strength printer - although I still keep my farm of HP4350's for non-duplex work and redundancy.

By the way - I bought a Konica Minolta BizHub 1050 EP. Comissioning it in the shop tomorrow. I hope I made a good choice - I have 1,000,000 duplex pieces to do in March!!!!!




Doug

Hey Scotman60,

You sound like you are leaving the stage I am just getting into.. I have a little gig where i need to lay B&W variable to about 40,000 8.5 x 11 a month on preprinted..

I need to go cheap and will be getting the data nightly via csv file to start... What software do you suggest and what printer?

Sorry to hop on your thread but it sounds like you could relate to where I'm at, thanks

-Erik

[giovgreg]

Hi
I do a large amount of bw variable data work. My workhorse is a cannon image runner 7150. The Cannon Service in my area is fantastic and the 'normal maintance' is something that can be learned fairly quickly as far as im concerned. PPM is 150 letter size and im driving my VD with IN Design via XMpie or thru Satori software's Bulk mailer for simplexed Varible Data. The machine has been in place for about 2 years and overall im pleased with its performance. The click charge is reasonable and for the volume your looking at it im sure the rate would be even better.

[MacDaddy]

Doug, went to open house at Konica Minolta to see some color production machines last week but they also had bizhub pro 1200 B/W was nice 120 a minute 3 million monthly duty cycle check out link . Konica Minolta Digital Press. bizhub PRO 1200/1200P.

[oxburger]

If you're the first responder to the post, it's not necessary to quote the entire friggin' question. We can all assume that you're answering the post for god's sake.

[bulksolution2001]

Scotsman60,

This is great info thanks! Ill pick up a 4350 on ebay and start testing... Ill be getting my data in a csv file nightly so now ill just have to figure out what software on my mac to use... maybe mail merge on word but ive never done that either

Thanks so much for the help.

[jimgriggs]

I have a HP 4350 with a stacker/stapler which works fine if I send one document to it but if I send a mail-merge job with many merged documents it does not recognize the individual documents and will staple them all together unless there are more than 15 pages in which case it just dumps them in the tray.

How do I get the HP 4350 to recognize that there are multiple documents to be stapled? There is a mail merge setting on the printer which does not seam to do anything. I have tried all the settings I can find in the PCL5 and PCL6 drivers and in MS Word mail merge.

Don't tell me that you can only print one document at a time to have it stapled. What use is that? HELP!!!