Advice for high quality prints on a used Color Digital Printer -- 450,000 clicks/yr

[jpfulton248]

I recently started a thread on this forum looking for a BW digital printer and got some good feedback. Since then we've decided that it makes a lot of sense to also try to accomplish our color needs on the same printer.

Here's what we need:
60,000 Color clicks/year on 8.5x11 80lb cover stock
380,000 Black clicks/year on 8.5x11 50lb text stock
All of the above is duplex.

We would really like to improve our solids and our screens... both are atrocious now on our Itek975 pfa / Ryobi 3200pfa and on our Canon ir105.

We would only be buying in the used market and unfortunately I think we are trying to find production quality but with low duty cycle... I think that is a hard thing to find but I'm no pro.

Thanks in advance.

Pete

P.S. Here's a link to the thread I started specific to advice for a BW printer:

http://printplanet.com/forums/digital-printing-discussion/33252-advice-bw-digital-printer-better-quality-than-canon-imagerunner-105-a

 

[cosmo]

look at the konica machines, they do it pretty well and your not doing that many clicks so the price is probably in your range.

 

[steveclv]

We looked at Xerox with their new 550/560 and also a Konica Minolta C6000 and were hugely impressed by the Xerox machine and their local support network. However we felt that at this time we could not justify the $60,000 commitment until we knew what volumes we could achieve and so I researched the used market. I managed to pick up a Xerox DC242 which had been refurbished for $3500 with a click count under 500k. The only thing that it doesn't do is duplex on coated stock which isn't an issue for us as any coated stock will be low volume and we can simply rerun it twice in simplex. Also registration isn't as good as the 550/560 but by careful design of the bleeds that isn't an issue either.
As the machine is a few years old (5) there are plenty of good deals on toners and drums on eBay so the cost of operation is way cheaper than a new machine.
The only thing that we have to budget for is potentially more maintenance but these machines were designed so that all the consumables and wearing parts (rollers) etc can be replaced quickly and easily by the operator, so service calls should not be too bad.

If you need faster than 55ppm B&W then there is also the DC252 and DC260 from the same family.

For the color, I also believe that the older machines using the non-ECO toner give a much better gloss finish than the matte finish of the new machines with their ECO low melt toner.