Konica Minolta c8000

[Toner4Brains]

Hi,
We are using a C8000 with creo for about 4 months now. Overal pretty happy with the colours and speed when it runs properly. Have a couple of issues though and need to know if this is a machine problem worldwide or something messed up by the engineers who set the machine over here in India.

1. The density of black is a big problem. If I print a job which is 100% black on coated paper it does not come out very dense (very bad if I compare it with my C6501), but that problem is not there on uncoated stock. Also, the density worsens over the length of a job. If it is a run of about 200 prints that 100% goes to about 80%. If it is a 4 colour image or vector with a lot of black the same problem occurs over the length of the job, but this does not happen with the other colours.

2. There seems to be some problem with the IBT cleaning blade assembly. Whenever we run a large job on 100 gsm coated/uncoated paper, waste toner scratches start coming on the print say after 3k-4k prints. If we stall the machine for about 5 mins a few hundred prints come fine and then the same problem. When we removed the assembly we could see toner formations above the plastic scrapper at the same positions where we were getting the scratches.

The black density issue is really creating a lot of problems and we are loosing quite a few jobs. Can somebody recommend anything !

Thanks,
Pratik

There was a firmware release about 4 months ago that addressed an issue with black density. I had never seen any issues with it myself, but I noticed in the release notes that black density was an item the update was addressing. Not sure what the version was but I'd run it by your tech to make sure yours is up to date.

[SDP]

My company had a C8000 installed a couple months ago, and we need to learn more about it's features before I can say much about it. At this point though, I thought my skirt would be blown up much, much higher. I am not that impressed, especially since they've said that our isses can be remidied. Let it be known that we had a C500, and we still have a C6501. The C8000 produces nice CMYK photos. I'll give it that. Two things that irritate me the most. 1) When you set a trim size in a Virtual Printer, it will not keep that size unless your document is exactly that size. For example, let's say you have a PDF that trims at letter size, but it's overall size is bigger because it has bleed and crops. Print to the Virtual Printer, and the trim size changes to the overall size of the PDF, and I have to change it back. 2) Not one trainer or tech can tell me how to do OPI/APR using PrintShop Mail, and the C8000. I desperately need to get that in place. Can anyone here help me with those two nagging issues? Thanks!

[lfelton]

Just to add a little to the total sum of knowledge about the c8000. We added one to our existing 6501s at the start of the year and have mostly been impressed. Paper handling, productivity, print quality all good and in line with expectations. We have had one major issue though, that dragged on for over a week (hopefully it's fixed now). You CANNOT rely on the colour management (i.e. inline spectro). We had a hardware fault that resulted in major colour shifts within jobs and from job to job. Even though the machine was set up to auto calibrate for every job, the colour shift was not picked up on at all, it just kept on printing, no errors reported.

So, the software has a major design flaw, i.e. your colour can be all over the place and ONLY the mk1 eyeball can detect it. You can't rely on the machine to do that at all. Watch each job like a hawk (i.e. don't rely on the first copy being representative of the whole run) and stop production if you notice a shift. Luckily for us we have other machines that we can switch printing on to, as it took about 6 visits and over a week to fix.

I suspect KM is aware of this as an issue, whether it's fixable on the current generation machine I don't know.