Xerox 700 Problems

[airyk]

We've had our Xerox 700 for 2 years and had atleast 6 changes on all the Developer housings.

[Kyloo]

Techs came in today and changed all developer housings. I noticed them modifying them slightly raising the main roller (the magnetic one that holds the developer.) They also brought me out a brand new Fiery used on the 700i. Tech here now setting up the new Fiery. I printed some test files before he got here and my issues are still present.

Ghosting is our biggest issue at the moment. We've noticed that every time ghosting can be seen, it causes by a white or light colored image duplicating onto a solid colored area.

Has anyone else seen this before or do I have a defective printer? Printer is still brand new. I never had these kinds of issues with my Doc6060 with 6 million 11x17 copies on it.

[Prographics]

There are two ways to look at the problems with the Xerox 700: 1) Xerox over-marketed the machine relative to it's engineered capabilities, or 2) Engineering flaws have caused it to fall short of its intended capabilities. Either way, it's a sad joke of a machine when compared to the competitors it's priced against.

We've been running one for more than two years, and I'd say the entire internals of the machine have been replaced at least three times. As stated by others, the biggest flaw is with the toner delivery system/developer housings. Here's the issue in a nutshell: toner is what the little metal developer balls in the housing use for lubricant, and if you run too much heavy coverage, the developer housings will require a constant stream of toner from the toner cartridges to stay lubricated and deliver toner to the sheet. The toner cartridges have a little tiny door that opens and dispenses toner to the developer housings, so when the housings need lots of toner due to heavy coverage, they have a hard time getting enough through the little tiny door and have to continue to make repeated requests for toner. Each one of these requests works the developer housing gears hard and the toner delivery motors hard, wearing them out much more quickly than they should, and they still don't wind up getting enough toner, wearing out the coating on the metal developer balls, necessitating the replacement of the housings. We run a lot of heavy coverage and we've had our housings replaced a dozen times. The tech suggest replacing the toner cartridges when they're less than 50% full since that exacerbates the problem with not enough toner getting though the cartridge door as the cartridge gets emptier. This is but one of many absurdities one will encounter when operating a Xerox 700.

I suspect the modifications that are being reported are attempts to retrofit the 700 with any modifications that may have been made on the new 700i/770. I haven't been able to get any confirmation that the toner delivery system has been improved (Xerox sales claims the issue has been addressed though "software improvements"), so if anyone has any information on this, please share it.

[arossetti]

We have 2.5 million clicks on our 700 and haven't had all the cronic problems that others are reporting. In fact this is one of the most reliable machines I have used for color. From DC3535 to X800. We have had developer housing issues but it just requires them to be replaced 2-4 times a year in our case. The actual act of replacing a housing takes a tech an hour and we worked out with the service manager for them to always have housings in town. We run print for pay material from manuals to marketing material 75gsm-300gsm and have very few issues.

[jricart]

As far as I know, sometimes ghosting can be caused by a defective or worn out Cleaning Blade. Ask the technician to check the cleaning mechanism.

JRT