Xerox 700 Vs Ricoh Pro C900

CanarcticPress

Well-known member
So we currently have a contract with xerox (The DocuColor700 and a Xerox 120) for the next two years but Ricoh is interested in buying it out and putting in a few of there machines (Ricoh Pro C900 and Richo Pro 907Ex). The current Ricoh tech. use to be with Xerox and there is two Xerox techs in town as well. So service would not be a problem (crosses fingers) and the 900 sounds a lot better but Id like to get some feed back from people who are running the 900..

Can you switch the fuser out? Do they have 2nd level support? Could I still use command workstation? If not what program would I have to use and could I still imposition with that program?

I have a few brochures for the 900 and of course they make it sound really good. What are some problems Im going to run into?

Also with Xerox supplies they've been consistently on back order for toners waste containers etc. Does Ricoh have a large stock?

Any other info you can give would be very helpful as well Thanks so much.
 
Having tested all four of the big mfp's high end versions, I feel pretty confident that the C900 is light years beyond the Xerox 700. The C900 is geared towards the Canon 7000VP, better printing than the Konica 6501 to me. The I-Gen depends on the operator, a good one can really do some nice work, and an under-educated operator can make stuff look like an office desktop printed it. It is arbitrary as to what is the best among the top pieces, but Ricoh's C900 is very sellable work. As for the 907, I would recommend a minimum of the 1107, and the 1357 if you can swing it. 90 ppm is too slow for black and white, especially if a finishing unit is utilized, such as the booklet maker etc. A bunch of opinion for you.
 
Well i started in the digital print two years ago and self taught myself. So Is the Ricoh C900 pretty user friendly? Most questions I had I was able to have answered either threw techs or second level support and it was easy to find info on the inter web to help fix problems I had with the 700.
 
The Ricoh's are incredibly easy to use. No lie. The onboard station basically walks you right through set up.
 
Re: Xerox 700 Vs Ricoh Pro C900

With the Fiery RIP, yes, you can still use Command Workstation.
You can change the fuser out, however, the fuser unit weighs over 60 pounds(not just a simple roller swap), so to be safe, it may be a 2 person operation.
So far, we have not had any issues getting supplies for our C900.
 
The fuser is not supposed to be a user replaceable unit due to the weight plus the bottom is open so anything you set it on will get oil on it. It just lifts out though and I had one tech tell me he has a customer that swaps it.

Damn near everything else can be swapped by the user. With the machine you can get a kit that contains all the maintenance things that you can swap out then the tech comes and rebuilds the units. The way I have been doing it is to just replace the units myself to get the machine running quicker then rebuild them later. Most the of the maintenance items get replaced at 400K and 800K so for the volume my customers are doing it's long enough in between that it's not worth trying to teach them how to do it.

Ask to be shown the TCRU (trained customer replaceable unit) items if you wanna see everything inside the machine.

The waste toner bottle in huge I have been having them go about 200K before getting full it is made to be dumped out. I keep an extra one at the customers so they can swap it then I dump them out when I am out there for something else. You could dump it yourself if you wanted but I don't recommend any of my customers do it because if they spill I will get blamed :)

It has a Fiery RIP so if the Xerox has a Fiery it should be about the same. The c900 comes with a ES1000 spectrometer. I think Impose is an add on but I know you can get it just not weather if comes with or is an add on. (hey i'm a tech not in sales)

Don't know what you mean by second level support ?
 
My office used to have a Xerox Docucolor 6060 with the Horizon booklet maker option. After almost a year with the Ricoh 900, I miss Xerox. Don't get me wrong, the Ricoh does have a lot of nice features that Xerox doesn't have. We looked at the 700, and the politics within our school district eliminated that choice, but I ran a lot of jobs at the local Xerox office on the 700 and the print quality is the biggest difference. The 700 has a print resolution of 2400dpi as opposed to the Ricoh's 1200dpi. The Ricoh was incapable of producing a gloss print. After several visits from our tech, his boss, the salesman, managers, etc., we've had the Ricoh fined-tweeked to get the best possible product from it. Still no high gloss, and we've had an occasional issue with toner crack. The Ricoh does advertise 90ppm but this is only true when you are using plain paper with no fancy settings. Using 110lb stock with one of the "Coated" or "Special" settings drastically reduces the speed. The bookletmaker option on the Ricoh provided front edge trim only. If we wanted to have a full bleed on booklets, we had had trim them. Unlike Xerox's horizon bookletmaker which trims all three edges. We've since eliminated the Ricoh finisher and purchased a separate Duplo stand alone finisher. The cost for the Ricoh and Duplo, by far, surpasses what we would have spent on a Xerox setup, but tell our district that (another story altogether). We've made the Ricoh work. We still have issues from time to time. Paper has to be fanned out at times because the machine has been known to double/triple/quadruple/pentuple feed. The thing about the Xerox that I liked is that setting up paper drawers was easy. We have 6 drawers on our Ricoh. Each one has to be set just right and settings in Command Workstation have to match otherwise we get that annoying error beep. The solution would be to set the drawers and leave them. Unfortunately we use about 12 different papers so we have to rotate. I know this sounds like one giant complaint. Maybe its because, thus far, our Ricoh experience hasn't been very smooth and we've had to deal with lying salesmen and a district office that doesn't listen to us. I would suggest you go to a sales office and test one out. Take a sample of every type of job you do and see if the Ricoh meets your standards. We weren't able to do it because there basically wasn't one available in our region. We were the guinea pig.
 
Re: Xerox 700 Vs Ricoh Pro C900

If you had gotten the Xerox 700, high gloss would still be a factor. The 700 doesn't use fuser oil, so you cannot get the high gloss you had from the 6060(we had one too). If you compare the 700 with the C900 and the current Konica Minolta machines, they all pretty much have the same finish to their output. I have a large stack of identical samples from the X700, the C900, and the KM6501, and you really cannot see a huge noticeable difference in resolution quality. When shopping for our current machine, I showed blind samples from all 3 machines to my outside sales reps, and, on average, none of them chose the same output from the same machine as their favorite. That told us that the quality was comparable among all of the machines. We have not run into the same multiple sheet feeding issues as you, and experienced only some minor cracking, which can be expected from any toner based machine.
 
The Ricoh does advertise 90ppm but this is only true when you are using plain paper with no fancy settings. Using 110lb stock with one of the "Coated" or "Special" settings drastically reduces the speed.

Not true: the C900 prints at 90ppm no matter what the paper settings are. It may look slower if you're using a large sheet -- say 11x17 or 12x18 -- but the engine speed spec is always based on 8 1/2 x 11. (In fact, at 11x17, it's slightly faster than "half" speed.) So, just of curiousity, how do you come to that conclusion?

Steve
(full disclosure: I work for Ricoh)
 
the c900 is not a production machine. check other threads here and you'll see tons of problems people are having with it. it is not good for as many impressions as they say. If you plan to use it for production plan to see your tech weekly
 
the c900 is not a production machine. check other threads here and you'll see tons of problems people are having with it. it is not good for as many impressions as they say. If you plan to use it for production plan to see your tech weekly

Happy New Year in advance. Which machine you are using and from when?
 
Well we have, hopefully soon had a Xerox 700

Well we have, hopefully soon had a Xerox 700

Our 700 has been a disaster, very unreliable, very environmentally picky and stock picky. Can't comment on the 900 other than that other posters that I have read seem to say that if you are going to get a 900, fork out the extra and get a 901.
 
The fuser is not supposed to be a user replaceable unit due to the weight plus the bottom is open so anything you set it on will get oil on it. It just lifts out though and I had one tech tell me he has a customer that swaps it.

Damn near everything else can be swapped by the user. With the machine you can get a kit that contains all the maintenance things that you can swap out then the tech comes and rebuilds the units. The way I have been doing it is to just replace the units myself to get the machine running quicker then rebuild them later. Most the of the maintenance items get replaced at 400K and 800K so for the volume my customers are doing it's long enough in between that it's not worth trying to teach them how to do it.

Ask to be shown the TCRU (trained customer replaceable unit) items if you wanna see everything inside the machine.

The waste toner bottle in huge I have been having them go about 200K before getting full it is made to be dumped out. I keep an extra one at the customers so they can swap it then I dump them out when I am out there for something else. You could dump it yourself if you wanted but I don't recommend any of my customers do it because if they spill I will get blamed :)

It has a Fiery RIP so if the Xerox has a Fiery it should be about the same. The c900 comes with a ES1000 spectrometer. I think Impose is an add on but I know you can get it just not weather if comes with or is an add on. (hey i'm a tech not in sales)

Don't know what you mean by second level support ?

Hello smaeger,
can you help me connect my fiery with with Richo c900, it is giving connectivity problem.
thanks
 

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