Iridesse to Ricoh/Konica

[joshlindsay]

Hey Printers!

My Iridesse and Versant 2100 and coming end of lease. Would keep but Fuji are asking an exorbitant amount to keep for another term.
Sadly I didn't consider a lease to own or $1 buy out at the beginning as historically we haven't had a press worth anything after 5 years.

We're looking around to see what to do and save some money over the next few years.

Fuji are pushing a Revoria (next gen Iridesse but basically the same thing) with a used Versant 180 as a backup/envelope printer.
It is however an expensive option for our volumes. We do enough specialty colour work to warrant having them but there are now options.
I'm not impressed with the print quality of the Iridesse (and probably Revoria as I don't think anything has changed) on lower quality paper and standard uncoated sheets (not the super smooth digital uncoated sheets). The Versant 2100 blows the Iridesse out of the water on those sheets.

In terms of volumes I'd say we're one of the lower volume Iridesse in my country with last year on average 120k per month between both presses (80% on Iridesse)

The reason we went with it 5 years ago was we'd had an 800 which was great. Then "upgraded" to a 1000i (that was horrid) and V2100. 2100 colour consistency was terrible and it's ability to hold registration was non-existent. The Iridesse is great at those two points and does a nice print on a nice smooth stock.

One of the options I'm considering is the Ricoh 7200 now that they have gold and silver. The samples I have seen from other local printers seems pretty good and on par with Iridesse.

As no one machine is perfect, nor provider, I've also seen samples from Konica (unsure of engine) but they seem to have a really good CMYK output seemingly better than the Iridesse.
They are offering a showroom Konica C6100 at a good price which could sit off to the side to handle the envelopes and extra colour work.

Not fussed on inline finishing. Have taken pretty much all inline booklet work off the Iridesse and producing offline now.

Anywho, looking to see what you guys think of the middle tier machines from KM and Ricoh.
I know a bunch of you have come from Xerox but don't see much about the Iridesse on here.

What do you like or dislike about your gear?

 

[kslight]

I came from a Xerox bkgd then went to a shop with a km 6085…which is the same as 6100 just a little slower. Tldr I didn’t have great experiences with that machine or the service. When the lease was up we went with a Ricoh 7210x. Has been a night and day upgrade in experience as far as uptime, consistency, registration, service, overall productivity goes. I like the overall print output better than the km but that’s more of a preference than me saying it’s a huge noticeable difference…non print people won’t notice. Couldn’t hope to be happier. We do have gold and silver (and clear and white). I’ve not used the gold but did test out silver, it’s a nice look. A little flat, not like foil stamping unfortunately, but still a good accent.

Also I run a lot of envelopes on the 7210x, it runs them almost perfectly (hugely better than the km 6085 with envelope fuser ever did). The downside on the 7210 is you’ll have to open flaps on envelopes…but that’s not a problem for me…we send large runs out anyway (yeah it takes time to open flaps but the entire shutdown and repeat process for changing to the envelope fuser in the km took much longer from start to finish).

As a side note, a single 7210 would be fine for your volume…that’s all we use and we are pulling similar numbers (all 13x19 sheets).

Quality wise our km machine was okay but had a fairly glossy output if that bothers you (the owner of the shop i work for always would fight me about this..they hated it…I don’t think any of our customers notice)…but had a lot of color inconsistency issues and the IQ system for fixing the registration was only great when it worked…Carries some serious design flaws.

 

[TJPrinter]

I’m no where near your volume and have no experience with Ricoh but it would drive me crazy having to open envelopes. The Versant is great for envelopes. I’m curious what Fuji would propose if you told them you’re looking at other alternatives and give a price for the used Versant 180 only. Unless your 2100 is really beat I wonder why they would give you a 180 to replace it.

 

[joshlindsay]

I came from a Xerox bkgd then went to a shop with a km 6085…which is the same as 6100 just a little slower. Tldr I didn’t have great experiences with that machine or the service. When the lease was up we went with a Ricoh 7210x. Has been a night and day upgrade in experience as far as uptime, consistency, registration, service, overall productivity goes. I like the overall print output better than the km but that’s more of a preference than me saying it’s a huge noticeable difference…non print people won’t notice. Couldn’t hope to be happier. We do have gold and silver (and clear and white). I’ve not used the gold but did test out silver, it’s a nice look. A little flat, not like foil stamping unfortunately, but still a good accent.

Also I run a lot of envelopes on the 7210x, it runs them almost perfectly (hugely better than the km 6085 with envelope fuser ever did). The downside on the 7210 is you’ll have to open flaps on envelopes…but that’s not a problem for me…we send large runs out anyway (yeah it takes time to open flaps but the entire shutdown and repeat process for changing to the envelope fuser in the km took much longer from start to finish).

As a side note, a single 7210 would be fine for your volume…that’s all we use and we are pulling similar numbers (all 13x19 sheets).

Quality wise our km machine was okay but had a fairly glossy output if that bothers you (the owner of the shop i work for always would fight me about this..they hated it…I don’t think any of our customers notice)…but had a lot of color inconsistency issues and the IQ system for fixing the registration was only great when it worked…Carries some serious design flaws.

Thanks for the great reply.

If we switched, my plan was to initially go with the Ricoh and if really needed add the KM. The Iridesse is a great machine and the 6 colours makes specialty colour work really easy but the lease payments are just too much for my volume.

What Xerox presses did you have before? Would you say the Ricoh 7210x is better than them?

Registration on the V2100 leaves a lot to be desired which does put a bad taste in my mouth for similar sized machines.
The Iridesse having the registration unit that the long edge of the sheet is pushed up against is really good.
You say registration in 7210x is pretty good. Is that on heavy weight card and banner sheets too?

Opening envelopes would be a bit of a pain but like you say doesn't take too long.
V2100 runs them pretty well through the bypass tray without opening.

I do prefer the satin matt look vs the glossy output. Saw some prints of a Canon 10000 a while back and it reminded me of the fuser oil on our old 8000. Much gloss.

That's a shame about the IQ501. Like everything looks great on paper but in practice not so much.

 

[joshlindsay]

I’m no where near your volume and have no experience with Ricoh but it would drive me crazy having to open envelopes. The Versant is great for envelopes. I’m curious what Fuji would propose if you told them you’re looking at other alternatives and give a price for the used Versant 180 only. Unless your 2100 is really beat I wonder why they would give you a 180 to replace it.

Yeah the Versant is pretty good with envelopes.

They are taking it out as Fuji has a 10 year life on their machine and are are claiming and can no longer service it.
The 180 will be an ex-lease unit and included at very little cost - which begs the questions, why doesn't my Iridesse which is also ex-lease have very little cost. Sigh.

They know I have been looking around but can't see them coming to the party much more. In our part of the world there was a scandal with Fuji doing some shady accounting practices which bought them some unwanted media and legal attention making it's way back to Japan. The whole business has "changed" and they are no longer doing deals to win business.

 

[kslight]

Thanks for the great reply.

If we switched, my plan was to initially go with the Ricoh and if really needed add the KM. The Iridesse is a great machine and the 6 colours makes specialty colour work really easy but the lease payments are just too much for my volume.

What Xerox presses did you have before? Would you say the Ricoh 7210x is better than them?

Registration on the V2100 leaves a lot to be desired which does put a bad taste in my mouth for similar sized machines.
The Iridesse having the registration unit that the long edge of the sheet is pushed up against is really good.
You say registration in 7210x is pretty good. Is that on heavy weight card and banner sheets too?

Opening envelopes would be a bit of a pain but like you say doesn't take too long.
V2100 runs them pretty well through the bypass tray without opening.

I do prefer the satin matt look vs the glossy output. Saw some prints of a Canon 10000 a while back and it reminded me of the fuser oil on our old 8000. Much gloss.

That's a shame about the IQ501. Like everything looks great on paper but in practice not so much.

The Xerox machines I used are a bit older i think than what you have so fwiw, probably not fair for me to make a direct comparison to new-ish stuff… we had J75s when I left, but I had also used a 1000 and versant (I don’t remember which model…) at the demo room. The demo room experience would have been around 4-6 years ago…it’s been closed for some time. Those j75s we had and the machines we had prior (8080, 6060, etc) struggled with many things, including registration, and lots of banding / streaking / other image quality issues I just never see anymore….always was changing drums on Xerox. Ricoh drums last for near ever….we have over a million on our machine and I have only changed drums once thus far.

I run a lot on 130# cover stock…it’s damn near perfect on the Ricoh after you set it up (on your paper profiles, you run a utility that has it print about 30 sheets and it scans it inline, and once it’s done you save that to your profile…rarely have to run that again for that paper profile). We also finish a lot through our duplo 646 so you can get very tightly produced stuff if you dial it in all in. On our KM registration was usually good (compared to the old machines mentioned above) until you got above 100#….I could never get it very good on the same 130#. And the IQ501 is flakey - sensors get dirty and you can’t really clean it (yes you get a wand - this just pushes more dirt back around inside, when it starts giving this message it needs disassembled), and when that happens you either have to wait for service or run jobs with poor registration. I never liked to use the IQ the way sales reps advertise - that is where it could in theory check constantly while you’re running - this slowed the machine way down…anytime you loaded paper or cleared a jam or machine stopped for whatever reason, it was a lot of extra time for the machine to adjust itself…and then when the sensor got dirty it didn’t work at all… On the Ricoh if your inline scanner gets dirty (not had it ever stop and say it was though) you just pull the transport out and the ILS is right there…you can just wipe it with a rag and be done. One reason I say IMHO our KM had lots of design choices that were bad engineering - not designed for user service.

I don’t run a ton of banner sheets, maybe 1000 so far, but registration has been good.

Envelopes - my opinion if you’re regularly running thousands at a time this style of machine is not that efficient anyway for envelopes from a feeding / output catching standpoint or from a cost per print perspective…but opening 1000 or fewer envelopes really doesn’t take too much time, and is productive enough. I usually don’t load more than 50 in the tray at a time, but you probably wouldn’t want to try to load a whole box in at once, and the output catch tray would still need unloaded frequently. If you’re running so many envelopes that opening envelopes is a deal breaker, probably better served by a dedicated envelope press.

 

[jwheeler]

I came from a Xerox bkgd then went to a shop with a km 6085…which is the same as 6100 just a little slower. Tldr I didn’t have great experiences with that machine or the service.

Also I run a lot of envelopes on the 7210x, it runs them almost perfectly (hugely better than the km 6085 with envelope fuser ever did). The downside on the 7210 is you’ll have to open flaps on envelopes…but that’s not a problem for me…we send large runs out anyway (yeah it takes time to open flaps but the entire shutdown and repeat process for changing to the envelope fuser in the km took much longer from start to finish).

Quality wise our km machine was okay but had a fairly glossy output if that bothers you (the owner of the shop i work for always would fight me about this..they hated it…I don’t think any of our customers notice)…but had a lot of color inconsistency issues and the IQ system for fixing the registration was only great when it worked…Carries some serious design flaws.

We have a C6085 and our experience has been quite different. We love it. That's why we wanted to buy a 2nd one, but KM had discontinued and we ended up with the C7090/C7100 series, which has been terrible. The C6085 is a workhorse for us, and we haven't had the color consistency or registration issues you mentioned.

I also have to comment on the envelopes. Changing out the fuser realistically takes about 3-5 minutes, plus maybe 3-5 minutes of warm up time. I'd much rather do that than open and close a bunch of flaps. We run thousands of envelopes per order...I couldn't imagine opening and closing every one them. When we have an envelope job, I tell the employee to first change out the fuser, then go get the envelopes and start loading the drawers while it's warming up. Usually by the time they've done that, it's ready to go. We use the DIP switch that enables us to load envelopes into 2 drawers. This means we can have continuous running because we load in one while it's running out of the other, and it automatically switches between drawers.

 

[kslight]

We have a C6085 and our experience has been quite different. We love it. That's why we wanted to buy a 2nd one, but KM had discontinued and we ended up with the C7090/C7100 series, which has been terrible. The C6085 is a workhorse for us, and we haven't had the color consistency or registration issues you mentioned.

I also have to comment on the envelopes. Changing out the fuser realistically takes about 3-5 minutes, plus maybe 3-5 minutes of warm up time. I'd much rather do that than open and close a bunch of flaps. We run thousands of envelopes per order...I couldn't imagine opening and closing every one them. When we have an envelope job, I tell the employee to first change out the fuser, then go get the envelopes and start loading the drawers while it's warming up. Usually by the time they've done that, it's ready to go. We use the DIP switch that enables us to load envelopes into 2 drawers. This means we can have continuous running because we load in one while it's running out of the other, and it automatically switches between drawers.

The physical changeout of the fuser isn’t too big of a deal - but rebooting the printer and fiery, and hoping the fiery connects and sees the fuser - was the issue. Then repeating that process for normal jobs. That was about 30-40 minutes.

 

[jwheeler]

The physical changeout of the fuser isn’t too big of a deal - but rebooting the printer and fiery, and hoping the fiery connects and sees the fuser - was the issue. Then repeating that process for normal jobs. That was about 30-40 minutes.

Gotcha. We have the built-in KM controller, so we don’t have that issue. We had the C8000 before this and the Fiery was always losing connection. Part of the reason for the KM controller. Other reason was because we do a lot of training manuals that have numerous tabs. It’s much easier to setup the tabs in the KM controller, and apply those same settings to future versions of the same manual.

 

[BigSi]

Hi Josh. I'm in a similar situation with my old V2100. Might go down the v3100i path. (sometimes better the devil you know). On the whole I've been reasonably happy with the quality of my v2100 (all though I go through 3-4 BTR's a month). It took me awhile to convince Fuji that I could fit these myself (now I can order these as a consumable). Something that concerns me a little with KM is there size here (relatively small), would they have a enough techs on the road? (not such an issue if you have a back up machine). Sorry don't no much about Ricoh.
Hardly ever get an envelope job these days and anything over x2000 I do on my GTO. Talk soon

 

[OriginalScuddy]

If you want a used C6100 all my leasing companies have them... Just msg me what specs you need. Your all in under 30K, even for the best config turn key.
they are super easy to self maintain. parts are easy to order/stock. Love them - been a konica "self trained" tech since 2009, no click charge is what makes us the most money.

Hit me up, love helping another shop cut out the middle man.

 

[kdw75]

We came from a V2100 and C75 to two 7210x machines. We run #10 envelopes without opening the flaps. Some will refold, but Sayer Brook brand run perfectly. As mentioned above, they are better in almost every respect. The only think I will say the V2100 was better at was the raw speed, but with the color, registration and maintenance issues, we produce more on the 7210s. We went from seeing service monthly to seeing them every 3 or 4 months. Our volume is 140k 13x19 sheets per month on all types of paper.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

We came from a V2100 and C75 to two 7210x machines. We run #10 envelopes without opening the flaps. Some will refold, but Sayer Brook brand run perfectly. As mentioned above, they are better in almost every respect. The only think I will say the V2100 was better at was the raw speed, but with the color, registration and maintenance issues, we produce more on the 7210s. We went from seeing service monthly to seeing them every 3 or 4 months. Our volume is 140k 13x19 sheets per month on all types of paper.

Last I heard Saybrook envelopes are no longer being made. I know this because they were our favorite! Nice to hear you enjoy your 7210, we love our V180P, the lease is close to ending as well.

 

[kslight]

Last I heard Saybrook envelopes are no longer being made. I know this because they were our favorite! Nice to hear you enjoy your 7210, we love our V180P, the lease is close to ending as well.

I heard the same about saybrook. For the last year and a half, the envelopes I buy have typically been “whatever I can get.” But the brand will absolutely make a difference. However the cheap stuff I get runs well, as long as flaps are opened.

 

[PricelineNegotiator]

I heard the same about saybrook. For the last year and a half, the envelopes I buy have typically been “whatever I can get.” But the brand will absolutely make a difference. However the cheap stuff I get runs well, as long as flaps are opened.

Printmasters are great. Not sure if you can get those.

 

[jwheeler]

Printmasters are great. Not sure if you can get those.

Agreed!

 

[Shawnd]

If you are looking to run envelopes flap closed on the Ricoh 7200 they sell an envelope feed kit that works surprisingly well for lower volumes, no more having to open up the flaps:

 

[Jbrujster (Mailing Guy)]

If you want a used C6100 all my leasing companies have them... Just msg me what specs you need. Your all in under 30K, even for the best config turn key.
they are super easy to self maintain. parts are easy to order/stock. Love them - been a konica "self trained" tech since 2009, no click charge is what makes us the most money.

Hit me up, love helping another shop cut out the middle man.

Hi, where do you get your parts/toner for KM 6100? thanks.

 

[printpartners]

If you want a used C6100 all my leasing companies have them... Just msg me what specs you need. Your all in under 30K, even for the best config turn key.
they are super easy to self maintain. parts are easy to order/stock. Love them - been a konica "self trained" tech since 2009, no click charge is what makes us the most money.

Hit me up, love helping another shop cut out the middle man.

Hi, our lease is ending soon on our xerox 3100 and we are on the hunt. Are you still able to get machines from your leasing companies?

 

[ReproElectroProspero]

I am flabbergasted by the multiple people here saying the Xerox Versant180 is great for running envelopes. We ran envelopes on ours for a year and despite trying every brand we could get our hands on, had terrible feeding, jamming, and quality issues. Ended up motivating me to purchase a dedicated envelope printer - a Formax ColorMax8. It has already paid for itself in operator time. They can run 5000 envelopes in the time it took our Versant 180 to run 500.