Anyone familiar with Ricoh 1107EX?

[Skinflint]

Does anyone use this equipment in a commercial environment?

What have been your experiences with it?

 

[rbailleu]

I have the 907ex. and efi rip. its nice only one major issue in the last year. motor failure in the finisher. some difficulty in heavey stock in the bypass feeder on top of the shorter multideck. but feeds well from drawers. we think its the best copier we have had. but we have only had canon image runners and a sharp in the past 10 years.

 

[Shutch4]

Ricoh 1107 EX

Ricoh 1107 EX

We just purchase 2 of these and they have proven to be a God send! Ours has the booklet makers and hole punch attachments. They are fast, quiet and an awesome graphical interface that is very easy to use. The copies come out crisp and are cooled after leaving the fuser so they don't fuse together on long runs.

We also bought the new Taurus Ricoh 751EX (Color). We love it so much we put in an order for another. With the 751 we purchased the Fiery Server (nice) AND the Print Shop-In-A-Box module which really adds to abilities to layout, color correct, etc.

Both machine have the full blow warranty where we pay for nothing, but lease and the click-age. Free toner, staples, service, parts and training. The smartest move we ever made.

Ricoh has been a REAL partner in this whole experience. We call . . . they come with solutions. I've been in printing for over 40 years and I have never experienced this level of support and commitment like I have with Ricoh. I'm very impressed with all they have done to help us be successful in an economy where Directors are saying close the Print Shop. Our management is saying expand the print shop.

 

[jokar]

Ricoh 1107ex

Ricoh 1107ex

We have had a Pro 1107 EX for a little over 2 years and after the initial set up, which took about 4 months, it has been reliable. We use it mostly for running 20# (70% of the time) and NCR. Most of our problems were with the Micro Press which drives the 1107ex and a C900. We had Ricoh and EFI people there several times a week for the first 4 months working out the bugs. We still have problems with the fiery on both at times.

 

[Craig]

I had a MP9000 which is a model or 2 earlier. We compared Ricoh 1107 to Konica Minolta 1200 and decided on the later. After you get a few Million on the Ricohs you will have issues. We retired our 9000 with a little over 15MM on it, the last year was a service nightmare. The changes between the 9000 and 1107 were not enough. The parts that we saw taking a dump (mostly duplex area... ALL plastic and registration rollers) were virtually identical.

 

[TOprint]

@skinflint, what's your volume like?

Not sure what one would expect from a 90 ppm machine, but retiring a unit after 15 million clicks doesn't sound that bad to me. Unless my math is off, that's 150k/mth for 100 mths (approx 8 years) or 200k/mth for 75 mths (approx 6 years).

Either way, I think the KM and the Ricoh are probably safe bets, and well priced.

 

[Craig]

@TOprint - The expectation is to have a production machine (that's where Ricoh is marketing it) be a bit more robust in how it is built. We went through 4 duplex units because paper would ware a groove in the plastic and create a skew on the second side. Jamming all the time because of other plastic guides that were warping in the fuser area. Little things like that could have used more attention in later models to make it a bit more user friendly.

When you have to clear 20+ jams a day and each jam is 7 to 9 sheets of paper it gets a little old real fast, not to mention costly throwing paper into the recycle bin!

 

[jokar]

Craig
You will probably have similar problems with a 1107ex. There is very little that isn't plastic inside. We had problems with "dog eared" sheets, when duplexing, because of worn plastic parts but our service tech was able to modify some of the parts ot correct this. If you get a good service tech he should be able to fix anything. Our first tech would blame everything on the paper.

 

[Skinflint]

@skinflint, what's your volume like?

Not sure what one would expect from a 90 ppm machine, but retiring a unit after 15 million clicks doesn't sound that bad to me. Unless my math is off, that's 150k/mth for 100 mths (approx 8 years) or 200k/mth for 75 mths (approx 6 years).

Either way, I think the KM and the Ricoh are probably safe bets, and well priced.

Clicks are around 100 per month.
We are a comercial shop and run everything from 20lb bond to 100lb cover. We also run 12x18 4up postcards with aqueous coatings on everything but mail panel.
I failed to mention we currently have 2 Nuvera 120's, so what we purchase will be replacing
the two devices.
I need something that is going to be dependable and flexible enough to handle the wide variety of stocks we run.

 

[jotterpinky]

We own an 1107ex and a 1350 (very similar as far as i can tell but the tech tells us there are quite a few changes). We have several issues with these that I would like to address when we update equipment next year

1. Registration - I know it has some sort of electronic registration but it's finicky and unreliable. We ran one job that we had to trash about 1000 sheets after we realized there was a scrap of paper by the sensor that was causing it to move the print by almost an inch out of register. This seems to be a problem on this machine because of the way some jams have to be pulled out and it often leaves a scrap in the turn from the duplex unit back up to the marking engine.

Even with the registration system working properly it's still hard to get it to square up good, most of our prints are square for the front side and skewed on the back. Yes, we have adjusted the amount of buckle for both the trays and the duplexing unit to no avail.

2. Heavyweight paper stock will not run in these machines. We were told they ran 300 gsm, about as heavy as it will reliably run is 110# index - same as our Canon Imagerunner. Forget about gloss stock.

3. Image quality. We bought this thinking it would give us good grayscale tones. It did...for a while then the screen started plugging up and the only thing the technician could do to fix it was a new drum. We've been replacing the drum after only about 200K 11x17 clicks which I'm told is far below it's expected life. The 1107 seems to keep a pretty dense black but our 1350 has a hard time keeping up with toner on runs that have larger black patches. The technician has turned up the toner supply and tweaked around with it to no avail.

4. All Ricoh B&W equipment that I've ran seems to have a weak spot when duplexing, particularly heavy stock. It always seems to be a problem in the B2 guide board area where it makes the turn.

5. Our 1350 tends to overheat and the motors that run the duplexing unit have some sort of electrical malfunction that causes them to skip or something. This causes it to fold the sheet of paper. If we take off the front doors and put a fan on it this goes away. Our technician has replaced every motor and component in the duplexing unit and this is what he came up with. We currently run this without doors and have the fan on it for runs over one hour.

 

[Craig]

Jotter - That's about the same issues we had with our 9000, and the reason we didn't go back with Ricoh. One month we put 960,000 on it and our tech we there every other day. We had to run it with the doors open too LOL! That month was a bitch too we ran it almost 14 hours a day to get the job done.

 

[[email protected]]

Hahaha. That's probably a pushin' her to the limits!

The Ricoh's mentioned in this forum are the best of the Ricohs but Ricoh is cheap plastic. But most are these days aren't they.

Jotter - That's about the same issues we had with our 9000, and the reason we didn't go back with Ricoh. One month we put 960,000 on it and our tech we there every other day. We had to run it with the doors open too LOL! That month was a bitch too we ran it almost 14 hours a day to get the job done.

 

[OkiTech]

Guys hi. We're in printing business as well as Copier sales/service. We use Ricoh MP9000 in our printshop and everything stated here are solid facts - we have similar issues - more or less. As far as machines - I am being offered a KM 1050 with 50 to 90 million clicks all the time as lease returns and those are still running... Pretty good number, I'd like to say - if you're considering a purchase of new or used machine - these might be worth to take a look at.