I bought a KM6501 in Dec and now need second machine

[grouimaging]

lkl7255

lkl7255

lkl7255,
I think your responses have been great. I recognize that you are a Xerox rep and I have appreciated your comments. I have read some on other posts by people who seem to be at war. End users like myself are seeking information that we can get on a forum like this without having to travel for demos and call references on customers who bought equipment already. A forum is a great way to get this info. I think it is great that you have a tag line that says you are with Xerox. That helps, and what helps more is the demeaner that you have used in communication information. Thanks.

Sounds like if we are going to grow into a second machine (our current load is not too much for one machine, but we need reduncency) that will be more industrial than our first we might need to look past the 700 and on to some more industrial machines like your 5000 and others. We believe that with Variable Data and printing postcards for our market we will have lots more volume in six months time. Most runs of postcards will be from 2000 pieces to 10000 pieces and that is 4up so tha is from 500 to 2500 impressions.

I don't think I can wait until Print 09 because my need is for June 1 to be up on a second machine. When and where is On Demand?

I did some looking today at the Ricoh offering and the C900 looks like it is about $125k from what I could find, but a post above said they are going to have in April a 70 and 55 cpm machine. That should bring the price down some. I don't need speed so much as I need redundancy and registration/skew fixed.

 

[Craig]

Grouimaging,
Coming from someone who has done this in the past, don't get too small of a machine. Don't keep making purchases based on what you are printing today. It takes a lot of stones to sign a lease on a $300,000 box when you are only running 45K per month, (that's what I did) but I will tell you from experience your volume will greatly increase. Your down time will decrease, you'll be more productive, your stress level will decrease. When you push a small box to it's limits every month, eventually it will crap out, their just not made to handle it.

 

[Gene Glass]

Yes! Even more than 50%.

 

[cosmo]

Grouimaging,
Coming from someone who has done this in the past, don't get too small of a machine. Don't keep making purchases based on what you are printing today. It takes a lot of stones to sign a lease on a $300,000 box when you are only running 45K per month, (that's what I did) but I will tell you from experience your volume will greatly increase. Your down time will decrease, you'll be more productive, your stress level will decrease. When you push a small box to it's limits every month, eventually it will crap out, their just not made to handle it.

So true, plan with the future in mind, try and put yourself in the same place in 3 years time, technology changes fast, and things get cheaper to produce, your worst choice is usually the machine that suits you now, the main reason for buying it is because its cheap.

But, the next guy down the road just brought a faster, maybe 2 times the cost machine and is killing you on quality and speed, and he can use that machine for its 3 year loan lifetime and make a profit, you are stuck with a machine that after 1 year is not competing with the current market benchmark for quality and price, and you are still paying it off and losing money.

Try and think about what you want to be doing in 3 years time, not the next 2 months, the whole idea of buying these machines is to make a profit, you cant make a profit if you are not keeping up with the expectations of the consumer.

 

[Gene Glass]

Oce announced their "branded" version of the EFI Fiery Central server. The interface looks very much like Command Workstation and is easy to learn and implement. Central enables jobs to be split over multiple 6500s. The software offers a fairly simple way to calibrate color across multiple engines.

Regarding paper registration, there are physical and electronic adjustments to get you to 1mm tolerance top to bottom, front to back.

I've worked with the KM 6500 for over two years and learn something new every day. I have customers who regularily produce over 100K images (on stocks over 256 gsm).

 

[vwrome]

The RICOH Pro550ex and 700EX are now released. Info can be found on ricoh.com and it seems like they would be a great fit.

 

[rsands]

We just got a 700 installed 2 days ago...went in with a faulty rip board but fixed immediately. registration is top notch on this unit and the alignment profiles make it easy to fix skew, x and y position, magnification, etc. its early days i know but we have got it running consistently within 0.3mm front to back....on "300gsm" stock duplex it runs at about .4mm out max when profiles are setup. IF i had the time to fine tune it more i could easily get that to be absolutely perfect...but i dont

 

[Practice-P]

We are looking into purchasing and KM 6501? recommendations/

We are looking into purchasing and KM 6501? recommendations/

We are looking to purchase and KM 6501, any recommendation.
Greg 949.400.4526

I bought our first color print for pay printer in December 08, a KM 6501 and now we need a second machine and we are looking for something that is better for registration and skew than what the KM6501 can do.

I need a recomendation as to which color copier will offer the tightest registration and least image skew in the $50k to $100k range. Thanks in advance

Right now we are told on the KM that a 2mm skew on a 18" side of a 12x18 image is within specification and we need a machine that will be much better than this.

 

[KMGI Sales]

Greg feel free to call my cell

630.217.5150

Mark Kahle
Account Executive
Konica Minolta Graphic Imaging
[email protected]

 

[grouimaging]

recomendations

recomendations

Greg,
we were learning this business on our KM6501 and struggling until KMGI Sales posted how to fix the skew and registration issues and now we are very happy. We have been happy for three days now. I hope that keeps up. This was our only real issue on the KM tha it was printing with skew. It looks like knowing how to use the interface goes a long way. I guess that speaks to either most customers are not as interested in getting straight prints or KM is not interested in getting them. I like the output on the KM. I took files this week to Canon on the C6000 and the prints were about the same as the KM. We are using Creo Rip and the Canon demo was on a Fiery and the reds were more saturated on the Canon. Don't know if that is a rip issue or not. Outside of that I could sell prints off of either machine. We have had ours since Dec and have 177K on it and are just getting started.
Last night I ran 1000 booklets 12 pages, 3 sheets and had one paper jam in 3000 sheets and I think that was because I had one sheet inthe tray damaged when I loaded it. I set it to print the last 350 and went home. feel free to call me 480-924-1945 ext 103 Jeff Burris Group Imaging, Mesa, AZ

 

[JaimeZ]

Just installed a Canon imagePRESS C6000. With NAQP membership discount cost around $110,000. The registration is dead on for both one side and duplex. It will print Classic Crest 110# stock and 14pt Coated Board. Image quality is as good as offset (we've been printing on a Heidleberg GTO five color for years) and I thought I'd never say that. A few shops in the area have the 7000VP and just love it, but the price is a bit more for basically the same machine. The difference is speed, the 6000 prints 60 28# 13x19 a minute and slows a little for board weights, where the 7000 is 70 minute regardless of the stock and size. The 6000 also has no fuser oil.

 

[Kingsfish]

c900

c900

a customer timed it at 48 12x18 images per min on 100# matte cover, call your rep for a demo and take a stopwatch.

 

[grouimaging]

c900 speed

c900 speed

Kingfish,
I am not sure if you were pointing out good things about the Ricoh C900 or not. 48 copies a min in 12x18 should be about 96 in 8.5x11, so it is running at the rated speed of 90 copies a minute. I am running 12x18 300gsm stock and get about 15 impressions per minute. That means the Ricoh would clock at 3 times that for production. Some of the work I am doing would be greatly enhanced at that production speed, even if the quality were off a bit (the first demos we saw on the Ricoh were light and lacking some detail, but I called them on it and sent them my prints of same images on the KM6501 to see if they can even match it)

 

[kire]

C900 speed

C900 speed

Yes - it is correct that the engine speed can be faster than rated 90. Because of necessary speed reduction in the fuser unit C900 slows down up to 3%, but it will always give you a minimum of 90 ppm or 45 ppm. When it comes to print quality the target for this engine was Xerox 8000AP and Canon Imagepress 7000 , a lot of testing was done last year and the engine is now within these targets. I will also say that Ricoh today is a completely different company than for a couple of years ago especially for production print customers. The new Production Print business group is now up and running, in US and europe. This group that also includes tech, pre and post sales and are dedicated just to professional customers and includes a lot of expertise from different environments like transaction printing from IBM, GA from Kodak and Xerox and so on. So Ricoh is today one of the largest vendors of digital print equipment and I think it will for the production print customers also be a good thing to have some more options to choose from.

Regards Kire

 

[grouimaging]

Canon C6000 installation

Canon C6000 installation

Jaimez,
regarding the C6000 you just got, what was the configuration? I was quoted almost
$120k today for same machine with Fiery 2100 rip and one section of the high capacity drawers.

 

[Whygen]

Greg feel free to call my cell

630.217.5150

Mark Kahle
Account Executive
Konica Minolta Graphic Imaging
[email protected]

Hi there - i noticed that you helped another forum user with registration problems.....we also have a 6501 and love the output from the machine but do have registration problems....just wondered if you could give us some tips please

Thanks

 

[KMGI Sales]

Just drop me an email and I will send you the word doc that should help you tremendously.

 

[acronut]

We installed a 6500 a year and a half ago. To date, we have run 1.1 MM sheets of heavy weight (220 gsm) stock. As others have stated, the KM is a good machine but color consistancy (within a long run and between runs) is been a challange. Creating spot colors using the ES 1000 spectro in the Fierry RIP is very straight forward. Getting the spot color to print consistantly is not. We calibrate the machine at least once per day and still find that the spots have moved. Large solids are also a struggle. Consistant color density is usually pretty good right after service but doesnt last long. At present, we are considering adding a Xerox 5000AP or an Indigo 3500 but will hang onto the KM as well.
FYI...

 

[grouimaging]

km 6500 and 6501

km 6500 and 6501

Does anyone own both a KM 6500 and a 6501? would you buy a used 6500 if you already had a 6501 or would you prefer to buy a new 6501 instead and why. I need a backup machine, but don't want to get into a machine that will not print as well as we have gotten off of the 6501.

 

[UberTech]

The 6501 does print a bit better the 6500. I thought most of the mods were a bit lame for a rebadged but the prints certainly feel more 'confident' than on a 00, hard thing to interpret when your not a tech I guess.

Particulary the reversed text on colour has improved.