I am looking at buying my first production machine, mainly for printing A4 black and white pages for perfect bound books.
I have just been given 2 ex-lease options, the ComColor 7150 (NZD 6,000+GST) and the GD7330 (NZD 13,000+GST).
I searched this forum on advice on the Riso ComColor range and came across this red flag:
Hence my question, what have other people experienced with the ComColor printers? Are they all as bad as
@SPP-ShaneC described it? Are there better options for a small budget?
We have used Riso printers for the last 25+ years, varying from duplicators to the ComColor. Currently running a Riso ComColor GD7330 mainly for NCR, raffle tickets, forms, and sometimes leaflets (especially variable data for docket books etc). There are advantages and disadvantages - it is an economical colour print, but the quality/colour match isn't always remarkable. It can't print out to the edge or a bleed, unless running a large sheet (Sra3 is very slow).The print dialogue box is sometimes too complicated. It is not suited to full coverage, and even solid colours can show through. The ink looks faded compared to a digital laser print, but there are settings to increase the ink density and dpi which greatly improves the print (although using more ink)
It is advertised as an envelope printer, but I'm on the brink of banning envelopes through it. 85% of the times we get grief running envelopes. As previously mentioned if the envelopes aren't of good quality and condition, it will give a lot of head strikes and/or blobs of ink on the edge or on the front of the envelope. The print heads are raised to accommodate envelopes, but it lessens the quality of the print. You can't print to the edge on the envelopes either, with about 8-10mm margin from the edge for the print area. We often print small Lotto envelopes (approx 145mm x 95mm) and most of the times they print really well with no problems. Sometimes the quality of the print isn't very sharp, so I feel it's not good enough quality for a lawyer/accountants practice.
We print a lot of 500 page documents to it, and after a few minutes processing time it prints very fast. Because there's no heat, there are never any curled/wavy sheets. ~Make sure your paper is not damaged as you'll be guaranteed dirty edges/print strikes or blobs of ink. We are in Ireland, and find it hard to source economical paper (Multicopy paper prints extremely well on it, but we can't source it at the minute)
It won't print onto coated paper (it doesn't dry so will probably glide on the sheet than absorb in) In the 90's there was paper made especially for the Riso and it gave great results (but it was double the price) Nowadays a good bond paper should do the trick.
It is great for variable data, as I mentioned above, and we often print books for perfect binding on it.
For us, 90% of it's use is for NCR paper, and I would *never ever* give up our Riso because it is perfect for docket books!
