KM bizhub PRESS C70hc vs Canon imagePRESS C700.... Which to choose?

[alghanem]

We are going into the photo book business and we have trouble deciding on which digital press to choose; Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS C70hc or Canon imagePRESS C700.

Being located in Egypt, digital printing is not widely used except for a handful of Xerox iGen's scattered around the country.

The specs for both machines are almost alike but Canon excels in two parts; print resolution (2400x2400 vs KM's 1200x1200) and print peak volume (400,000 vs KM's 330,000).

The Canon C700 is a new machine and is hard to find a review for; however, based on your experiences, which would be a better machine at least in terms of reliability, print/color consistency, paper jams, .... etc.

Any insight is highly appreciated.

Thank you

 

[johntheventer]

Ok - Ive been down this road - not with those two machines but…

Firstly - forget about print resolution - 2400 x 2400 dpi means nothing - the human eye can't even tell the difference between 1200 and 2400 - and very very often the manufacturer claims to print at 2400 x 2400 but all they are doing is packing more dots per square inch - and they do this by overlapping dots and other methods - many times this starts having a fairly big impact on quality such as banding and dark patches etc… so don't even use that as a guideline -

Secondly - Forget about print speed - what you desperately want and what will make or break your business is reliability and consistency. What is going to be very important is front-to-back registration - the machine must be able to print within at least 0,5 to 1mm tolerance - you do not want to have to "baby" the machine because of jams etc… There is no point in having a machine that can print huge volume or speed but can't do it reliably. Also check for stuff like user replaceable parts - this helps in getting troubles fixed without waiting for the tech to come.

I would also suggest you take the machine without any finisher, sorter, folding, punching etc - you'll fall over backwards when you discover how expensive that extra finisher unit is - and this is also the place where most of the jams occur. You also can't ever really sell the finisher after its life-cycle, even back to the manufacturer. Seriously, for the price of the finisher you could get really a few good pieces of really good second hand online finishing equipment.

to give ou an idea - six years ago we bought a xerox - the finisher (just fold, sort and 4-hole punch) was $25000 - then we took it off cos of all the jams - then we discovered it's got no resale value!! To anybody!!

And don't let the manufacturer tell you they can't sell it to you without a finisher - they can - when you order a machine very often it only gets assembled and tested upon order, then stripped, shipped, reassembled and delivered to you.

My experience with Canon (south africa) was very very bad - everything they do is weird, from the way the count their clicks, to their invoices to the software - It was about six years ago, and they were not production machines but still…

Good luck!!

 

[alghanem]

Thank you for the advise ... I appreciate it.

 

[Puch]

You really want to do the photo book business the right way if you decide to get the KM C70hc. This machine is way off the general bunch of printers, having quite different toners. You will have a hard time matching any CMYK-defined colors with that. I mean, if you encounter a sample (eg. from a former production run), you will have troubles producing the same, even if you're an expert in color management.

On the other hand, the gamut of that beast is huge, so if you employ a full RGB workflow, and color separation is happening right at the RIP, directly into the printer's color space, you will have a definitive advantage over the average offset-mimicking CMYK printers.