Small Booklet Maker for Small Digital Shop

kslight

Well-known member
We are getting ready to upgrade our color printer (KM 6085) and I think the best route for our booklet volume (typically small on demand runs totalling up to a few thousand a month, sometimes oddball sizes, oftentimes thickness of 15+ 80# gloss text pages plus a 100# gloss cover front cover) is to invest in a small offline booklet maker (Duplo 150?) versus investing in a different inline booklet maker (Plockmatic 350?) that attaches to the replacement printer. We already have a Duplo 646 so we do not need inline creasing capabilities, and we have a guillotine cutter so we do not need a three knife trimmer either. Currently our inline booklet maker is a bit too limited for us (can't do thick books, slitter / creaser not good quality) but I think that's just what you get when a printer company tries to build a booklet maker instead of a finisher company. We also have a very small print room, and of course a printer with Plockmatic 350 and 3 knife trimmer becomes quite large, and even that device wouldn't help us when we want to do half size or small books, we would still have to use it offline.

Any alternative recommendations for a small offline booklet maker for short runs, or any reasons I am missing where it might make sense to invest in an inline booklet maker?
 
Do you plan on getting a square fold? Trimming booklets on a guillotine without one can be difficult. A BM60 and SFT from Morgana could be a small footprint combination that would work for you.
As an aside, what are you replacing the C6085 with?
 
Do you plan on getting a square fold? Trimming booklets on a guillotine without one can be difficult. A BM60 and SFT from Morgana could be a small footprint combination that would work for you.
As an aside, what are you replacing the C6085 with?
We have a square fold right now on the printer, but don’t really use it, so I do not think that is super important to us. Most of our booklets today have to be done completely by hand so we are used to making the trims on the guillotine. It is not my favorite process but we do it. If we had an offline booklet maker it seems like we may be able to head and foot trim first and then feed that through a booklet maker with a face trimmer.

I’ll look at the Morgana, thanks.

Konica wants to replace with a 7090, but I am also shopping against Ricoh 7210/9200. If you attach a Plockmatic 350 to the Konica it looks like it uses the Konica trimming unit not the Plockmatic one, which concerns me as we do not like the Konica slitter.
 
What are your average monthly clicks on the C6085?
Why are you looking to replace - that machine can only be a maximum of just over three years old, right?
From the issues you've described, would I be right in thinking you have an FS-532 finisher fitted with SD-510 booklet maker? That is only a lightweight unit, the dedicated booklet maker modules (SD-506 / SD-513) are in a completely different league.

Although, I'm also a fan of offline finishing, for the flexibility it gives, that it will long outlast the life of a print engine and hold a good residual asset value.
 
What are your average monthly clicks on the C6085?
Why are you looking to replace - that machine can only be a maximum of just over three years old, right?
From the issues you've described, would I be right in thinking you have an FS-532 finisher fitted with SD-510 booklet maker? That is only a lightweight unit, the dedicated booklet maker modules (SD-506 / SD-513) are in a completely different league.

Although, I'm also a fan of offline finishing, for the flexibility it gives, that it will long outlast the life of a print engine and hold a good residual asset value.
The lease is nearly up, it has over 4 million on it (mostly 13x19 so close to 9 million in Konica’s eyes). It’s been here almost 4 years. Conceivably one option for us is we could try to lease it for another year and just buy a booklet maker, but I would rather start fresh.

We do have the sd 513, it is the worst finishing device i have ever used. It is severely limited at the thickness of books it supports, it is slow, it has an overwhelming tendency to jam and misfold / make bad books, the slitter is poor quality (even after new slitter wheels installed) and currently doesn’t work at all, and every sheet you print passes through the slitter whether you use it or not, which is a very poor engineering choice and creates its own crippling set of problems when it doesn’t work correctly. The creaser also causes you to fold crooked, so not all that useful either. Perhaps those are all instead service issues but I have had service out on these issues many times and they have not resolved them, to the point I assume the finisher is just a junk device.
 

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