Best Digital Printer today

[ondemandbindery]

I just have to know. Are all of you posting to this trying to prevent someone from buying a digital machine? If you read through this thread all of the Digital machines are junk and they break down all the time. If all of this information is validated, how in the heck are your companies making money with all the quality issues and downtime? Me no understand............

 

[overscan]

I just have to know. Are all of you posting to this trying to prevent someone from buying a digital machine? If you read through this thread all of the Digital machines are junk and they break down all the time. If all of this information is validated, how in the heck are your companies making money with all the quality issues and downtime? Me no understand............

It's a mystery to me too. In the end you just do what it takes to stay in business. Which for us is getting a little tricky since xerox uk took away or mostly broken dc250 and replaced it with a completely broken dc260 (a week ago!). They might get around to loaning us a working machine some time this week(!) but in the best comedy traditions the delivery crew wont be able to take away the broken dc260 thus leaving us with no way to use the loan machine due to our small premises and lack of space. At some point they say that they will deliver us a proper replacement machine (250/252/260?) and if we're really lucky they might even arrange to take the other machines away. If not then passers by will witness us all pressed against the shop window by an ever growing army of grey xerox boxes. I have to admit that I've been quite shocked by the lack of concern that xerox uk have for our situation. Still, we're off to ipex in a few days to decide which bunch of idiots we'll be buying our next machine from. At then end of the day we need some printing hardware capable of doing extremely short runs on a wide range of boards with variable data so digging out our old hamada isn't going to help.

 

[UberTech]

I just have to know. Are all of you posting to this trying to prevent someone from buying a digital machine? If you read through this thread all of the Digital machines are junk and they break down all the time. If all of this information is validated, how in the heck are your companies making money with all the quality issues and downtime? Me no understand............

Digital machines are actually pretty reliable. The problem is people apply the word 'digital' as they would anything else like a digital watch or digital TV. The immediate expectation is that is infinitely better than it's predecessor, in this case offset. Which, it is not. People keep trying to draw parallels between the two when they should actually complement each other. A bit like a delivery company that has a van and a 2 tonne truck. They could deliver everything in the van but it's best for quick jobs leaving the major work for the truck.

The other problem is that sales people try and sell the van as a truck. Then you get the machine in the door and find out that the truck is actually a van that your stuck with for 3 year like it or not. This is when you start to get the pessimism that you find rife in this forum.

Or what I find more often is they sold the van to a cycle courier and the machine spends more time idle than working which is worse than a machine being flogged to death.

What you find here is extremists, they are either extremely annoyed with there machine or extremely passionate about what they do. Your not going to find any posts here about "I really love my machine", unless they are reps trying to drum up some work.

 

[Steve_S]

I just have to know. Are all of you posting to this trying to prevent someone from buying a digital machine? If you read through this thread all of the Digital machines are junk and they break down all the time. If all of this information is validated, how in the heck are your companies making money with all the quality issues and downtime? Me no understand............

Not at all. You have to pick a machine that is suitable for the business that you have and want to keep. "Digital" presses are quite reliable, especially given the huge variety of substrates, weights, and coverages we throw at them daily. How many press operators have to adjust for 20 or 30 stocks in a given day? Not many, but we have done it to our digital presses frequently. Everyone has their favorite "label" and likes to throw darts at the others. That's where a lot of the breakdown talk comes from. But if you buy any digital press on the market, and expect no downtime, you are foolish.

 

[Netrunner9]

Our options: Xerox 5000AP/Xerox 700 or Xerox 7000AP/Xerox 700 or Canon 7000VP/Canon 6000 or Xerox iGen4-110/Xerox 700 or Xerox iGen 3-90/Xerox 700.
.

What did you purchase and how is it working out for you?

 

[gcspec]

Please - give me a break!

Please - give me a break!

Well the C900's sweet spot is ~200k so everything else being equal you could get multiple C900's for the price of one iGen.

Word of caution to the Ricoh C 900 lovers out there. There are 2 in my state (I am a Xerox sales guy) in GA accounts and one is being removed by Ricoh due to a complete lack of performance and the other is on the ropes as well. By the way, the one coming out is being replaced with the Xerox 700. It ran all of the stocks that their Ricoh couldn't run and produced a far superior image.

Forget the bias and the hype, unless you are a complete idiot, there is simply no way to compare that device to the Xerox 700, KM 6500, Canon 6000/7000 or anything you throw in the mix. All Ricoh talks about is "speed" - big whoop! What good is the speed when it's always down?

 

[tshark]

I guess that is why the Ricoh won the Bertl 5 star award last year. Outstanding registration, less than 1% color variation from sheets one to three thousand on AGFA provided graphs, not their own. Sounds like Georgia has "operator error".

 

[Steve_S]

Sounds like Georgia has "operator error".

...Or techs that are not worth their salt. Good techs can make or break whether a piece of gear is successful in your facility. I would be nervous about a machine not outperforming an X700 - Xerox refused to install here because they said what we run daily for paper would kill their techs, so their service manager halted the negotiations and we bought our second Oce CS665. At least they were honest instead of having us beat our heads on the wall for 6 months and then yank the machine out.

 

[salecha]

The stats were just for the Canon 6000vp. We put @ 65k impressions on the Canon and @40k each on the Xerox boxes.

I should point out that the number of service calls per month that I quoted was also just on the Canon.

Whether reliability of your Canon 6000vp has improved or still same/ deteriorated. Have you thought about replacing 3equipment by buying Xerox 800/1000.

 

[printer in heart]

Whether reliability of your Canon 6000vp has improved or still same/ deteriorated. Have you thought about replacing 3equipment by buying Xerox 800/1000.

I'm getting 800 installed tomorrow. I read a few good and bad comments here. If anyone is interested, I'll post my comments once installation is completed and production have started. I checked Ricoh 901 and I liked a few things, less space, more paper trays as base configuration but copy quality were superior on Xerox 800

 

[Despotes]

I almost couldn't stop laughing when my Xerox rep can in and started telling me how they were "justifying" iGen installs with a volume of only 40,000/month!!!!!!

Xerox tried to sell me on an igen3 when they 1st came out. At the time I was averaging 168k per month. I went with two kmc6500s. I'm am now running 350k to 450k monthy at end of lease and am ready to upgrade. What to buy...what to buy?

 

[julianpoggenpoel]

Steve, lots of info to get your head around here. First of all I'm a qualified Nexpress operator, I spent some time in Germany training on the Nexpress and it was always siad that its direct competitor was the iGen3. I've spoken to lots of companies in London and seen lots of outputs off the iGen and one thing stands out.... your quality on these type machines depends largely on the competance of your operator. I'm prity sure that Xerox trains your operators as part of the deal, right?????? Yes the machine plays a huge role in that but its down to the operator and the way the machine is maintained and set up. We currently have 2 Xerox 700 and on a whole they are ok. Fairly consistant solids and many of the consumables can be changed by the operator so downtime is minimized. Having said that I still don't think its a "proper" production machine but if you are considering having it as a back then that would be ideal..... however, I don't think the quality can compare to the iGen just remember that the xerox 700 does not use any fuser oil so colours are flatter and not as "vibrant" as the iGen. The Canon 7000 in Europe is now being sold by Nexpress dealers. They are marketing it as the baby nexpress. When I saw the machine in a demo the reg was appauling to say the least but then again it could just be that that machine was hammered all day without any sort of maintanance. I still think it would be worth the look if the figures made sense. But by the sounds of things you are clearly leaning towards the iGen and I don't blame you, its a blinding bit of kit!! I would just beware that using the Xerox 700 as a backup would not compare in quality but then again some of your clients might not want that "glossy" look coming from the iGen so now maybe theres a chance that you can gain new clients who would prefer the "flatter" look as far as colours goes. Either way, yours is a good situation to be in... good luck mate!!!

 

[Tbiller]

All I can say is that our X 700 is a disaster. We are constantly having techs in to address misfeed issues, quality issies (and no, I don't mean slight inconsistency) RIP issues. Disaster. Maybe the bigger Xeroxes are better, but I hope we can find something that is because it is true, you can't run a business this way. Luckily digital is only part of what we do.

 

[iambuzzman!]

Best Digital Printer...

Best Digital Printer...

Having primarily serviced the Canon 6000/7000 the past 3 years, I can agree whole heartedly with all of its users about the downtime. It is not service friendly and it is definatley not environment friendly. This machine requires a constant environment, and I do mean REQUIRES. I saw machines in warehouses with no air conditioning or heat and humidity levels far away from what Canon says the machines require. This led to problems daily due to the weather changing, sometimes twice in the same day.

If you are in a metropolitan area such as Chicago you will get the better service due to the specialization. Since the machine is not user friendly in replacing of what most vendors call user replaceable modules such as webs, you will go into fault code failure that cannot be fixed without service man intervention.

Your operator MUST be willing to spend extraordinary amount of time tweaking constantly for everything from registration to color matching to paper curl to you name it.

And you have to have planned backup when it does go down. Too many print shops with only 1 color, yet multiple b/w.

 

[yanger]

All I can say is that our X 700 is a disaster. We are constantly having techs in to address misfeed issues, quality issies (and no, I don't mean slight inconsistency) RIP issues. Disaster. Maybe the bigger Xeroxes are better, but I hope we can find something that is because it is true, you can't run a business this way. Luckily digital is only part of what we do.

We've had our X700DCP for a year now, and it's been pretty good. A few issues [skewing 13x19s 100# stocks, finisher tray stacking issues, density/heating] but all in all, I think it all depends on the technician who looks at your machine.

Do note, if you run alot of 12x18s and 11x17s there are roller mark issues you will have to deal with. the 7000/8000AP have heat fuser roller technology which leaves grooves when you run 11x17s [11" grooves], thus when you run 12x18s that need print towards the edge, you'll need to either place a service call to get the fuser replaced. Bonus on the X700 - the fuser is customer replaceable. So for us, we carry 3 different fusers [11x17, 12x18, 13x19] and registration is awesome on the 700s.

We're working on getting a Xerox Color 1000 replacing our 4 year old 8000AP - Love the things you can do with it.. the only frightening thing is the transition from Creo to Fiery - which I think we will be able to manage...

 

[MsArtDirector]

While I can't speak for the Canon 7000/6000; I can speak for the Canon 5051 Image Runner. It's been nothing but trouble, and doesn't play well with Adobe products (in my case CS3 and Acrobat PDFs -- and yes, we do have Fiery software). If you do go with Canon, check to make sure the lease doesn't forbid you from cancellation for "any reason whatsoever, " including if the equipment breaks down... like ours does. I'm stuck with 2 more years of revolving door techs, and, frankly; it's a daily battle to get things to print out correctly.

 

[simpleprint]

A little something I was once told...

A little something I was once told...

If you are in the market looking for a new Digital Press/Machine/Printer, what is the #1 factor that will make you decide for one particular vendor?

â–¡ Monthly Lease Payment
â–¡ Click Charges
â–¡ Technology and Features
â–¡ Local Technical Service and Support
â–¡ Financing Terms and Conditions
â–¡ Business Development Support
â–¡ Vendor Reputation and Experience
â–¡ Upgradeability
â–¡ All of the above equally
â–¡ Other

Please, bear in mind that some of these issues are so "life or death" it’d be unwise to choose one above the other. For example, Click Charges vs. Support.

Another thing to consider, you might get more useful data by turning the poll on its head, which do you value LEAST? When we do that, Business Development Support would be at the top of my "reverse list"! See what I mean?
We once had horrible experiences with our Xerox DocoColor 250s...a debacle that brutally taught us the importance of Local service and support.

Who cares what it CAN do, if it CAN'T do it when clients need it?

Regards,
simpleprint