Canon ImagePress C6000 Review

[plainblackguy]

For the past 20 months I've been using a Canon ImagePress C6000. I'm a fairly light user only putting 50,000 clicks or so a month on the machine, but almost all of them are Carolina C2S 12pt card stock, so it's a bit heavier than normal usage. I use a Creo rip to drive it.

The Good:
- The image quality is great. I have absolutely no complaints there.
- The Creo rip is fantastic. I much prefer it to the Fiery that I used to use. It's easier to use and I get better color quality.

The Bad:
- We do color calibrations at least twice daily, and still cannot get the colors to match from one hour to the next, let alone one day to the next. It is especially bad at keeping the color on the front and back the same. If you print the same image on the front as the back you get a slightly different color than the front, especially as the day goes on.
- For the past four or five months we're averaging 3.5 service calls per week. For a couple months there we were having service calls every single day.

We use Gordon Flesch to service this machine. They seem to do a decent job. The tech supervisor is a very patient individual and quite knowledgable. That said, we get wildly conflicting reports from their techs as to why we keep breaking down. Some say it's the paper we're using, while other's say that we've had some bad luck, while others say that this is typical of the Canon's reliability.

Overall, I'm not sure whether we have a lemon, the image press is unreliable, our expectations are too high, or if we are just getting bad service. Gordon Flesch will be replacing the unit soon to test the theory to test the lemon theory. I'll post a follow up to report how things go with that.

 

[cosmo]

good to hear you like the creo, i never looked back after switching from fiery. As for the breakdowns, they are cheaply built machines that will just do that, we have a konica 8000 and its up and down like a yo-yo for breakdowns, its just the nature of these type of machines, they use cheap plastic parts and crappy cogs and belts, we have been running digital copiers, they aint presses for 10+ years now and its always been that way, where as our offset presses only need repairs once or twice a year. Only one thing i can suggest, make sure it is as level as you can get it, if they are on a slight lean they dont run very well.

 

[Terran Sin]

Just to offer our experience for comparision: We're a small copy center for a nonprofit running during business hours only and coming up on our 60th month leasing a Canon Imagepress C6000. We've been happy to finally get a machine that gave great quality, performance and reliability after suffering through a Canon 3100 serviced by a company we will no longer use.

Equipment: Canon C6000 with saddle finisher, booklet edge trim, punch, POD paper deck, auto document scanner feeder, document insertion unit. Fiery A1200.

Background: started out with limited knowledge on using this machine in 2009. Ramped up over time from 300k annual impressions to now expecting 500k by end of August (our measurements are by our FY) averaging 61k monthly over last 6 months. We mostly run recycled stocks and our typical jobs are 100-500 copies of 8-32 page reports run on 11x17 Mohawk 100 28#, folded and stapled in the machine. Sometimes we'll run a 12x18 Mohawk Color Copy Premium FSC 100# Cover for a full bleed trim. We also do our business cards and have produced custom projects for our marketing group that turned into bigger jobs that we thought would have been sent out to print but our pricing (at cost) was too good to pass up. Its rare for us to have a jam but its usually going to happen when we're running cover stocks 80#to 110# and 80# tabs. We're spoiled by not being a commercial shop and otherwise able to pretty much give our internal customers only what works best for us AND we can eat our mistakes and spoilage.

Yes, color calibration can...wander a bit. Typically we see the problem when the humidity is low due to electric heating. We have good A/C but no option for adding humidity other than using a small vaporiser and we stopped bothering with that as is just easier to re-calibrate after lunch. We have very little problem ever with registration.

We're happy with the Fiery but don't have any other experience to compare against it. It's reasonably fast, maybe taking a couple minutes to rip most large jobs. We've only see it choke once on a massive 140 page graphics intensive, messy detailed looking budget submitted to us by our database analysis group who had never put one together before. It took nearly 15 minutes before the machine had it digested and started to output.

Typically we see 1 of the 2 service techs that work on our machine about every 6 weeks, mainly for PM's. Ours was one of the early machines in our area and it has been pretty much the educational tool for the techs. One of the main sales pitches our service company stands by is their policy of not skimping on the preventative maintenance and replacing parts exactly according to when Canon suggests. Every once in a great while we'll get an error code that stops us or we'll report hearing the unusual sounds that mark a plastic gear/roller/guide is beginning to fail and they'll relace the entire component or sub-assembly. A good service company makes a world of difference. We've got the 4 hour response time on service calls and the techs call us back to see if its a critical deadline being held up to run out right away even if near the end of our day.

We're located in the DC metro area and have every brand option on machines and service companies. Being a nonprofit also means every dollar spent is precious and rigorously justified. The selection/pricing for the machine and maintenance were competitively bid and we're not paying above the range for either.

Reading the stories here on Print Planet and talking to guys in other shops make me realize that we're working in our own little niche. Kudos to all you working folks out there, I can see this is a tough way to make a buck commercially. But we're not immune to the economy either and I've lost 3 positions in the copy center over the last 5 years. There was intense discussion last year about shutting down operations and moving to a self service room for copier/mail/express. We've been able to justify that we're saving our organization at least $150k after our operating expenses.

I may have rambled a little off topic here, but that's our C6000 experience. The machine is at the end of lease and has under 2.5 million clicks on the clock. It looks good, runs good and does what we need. I'm looking at keeping it for another 24 months on a pay to own lease renewal and take my time in researching new equipment to replace it after that.

I'd suggest looking at your options for other service companies, but card stock seems to be right on the edge of what this machine can handle.

 

[plainblackguy]

We've got the new C6000 in place, for about a week now. We've had a service call on it every single day since we've had it. Though I'm kind of expecting that, since right after you install a new machine you tend to have higher than average service call volumes. We'll see how it plays out after a month.