KM C6501 vs Xerox 700 & 5000
KM C6501 vs Xerox 700 & 5000
I approach the purchase of a digital production press with some trepidation but following a recent mailshot from Xerox I was impressed at the huge steps taken over the last 15 months.
Having had demos and trials on both the Xerox700 and C6501 machines any colour issues are certainly down to the rips and in the case of Xerox the operators/demonstrators not being "printing" people, openly admitting they know nothing about screens or colour.
The Creo rip shone on both machines when it came to colour with a much wider colour gamut than is ever achievable with traditional CMYK inks without the mixing of a special colour such as a Rhodamine+Magenta or running a 5th colour. The screen angles of the Xerox were a bit weird and the 200 screen made the images look flat, moving to a 150 as one would expect increased the contrast and produced a much sharper image. For those unfamiliar with screening this sounds completely counter intuitive! The Creo rip on the Xerox produced solid fine lines in a simple 50Y to 100Y 100M graduation and try as they it wouldn't go away. The same image on the KM was perfect and totally indistinguishable from the litho version. The Fiery rip was flat and lost detail despite being callibrated to my stock, light grads and pastels burnt out completely, maybe if you are printing strong colours thats not an issue.
The registration of the KM was line perfect with the 0.25pt crop marks being crisp and despite me being mean and laying them down in all CMYK plates they were in perfect register. The Xerox increased the line weight to double and there was irregular fit problems on all 8 crop marks over the SRA3 page. Fit problems manifested themselves on the Xerox with the Magenta and Cyan being a full dot out on a 100C100M solid. The build quality may have a huge amount to do with this register issue, as the KM C6501 has a steel carcass and the units are really held together solidly.
The Xerox had stray toner toner around the cartridge loading bay this is accentuated by the machine being light coloured and 'plasticy'. The C6501 was able to handle the board easily... both machines handled 300gsm coated and uncoated without a blink! The C6501 also handled 330gsm/450mµ without any problem... sorry if any of the Konica Minolta guys read this... I was lying! The C6501 had almost twice the 40,000 clicks the Xerox had so their excuses about requiring servicing were falling on deaf ears ...and when I take time to go to a Xerox showroom I don't expect a machine to need a service!
Also Xerox, after my 2 hour drive and 3 hour demo with a cheque book in my pocket demo a coffee would have been nice!! <<< listen and learn! Haha! The Xerox dealer kept calling the machines 'copiers' which was really aggravating everyone else as they were calling them 'digital presses', this may be the problem... Xerox are copier people through and through. Although with the iGen in their stable I find this sad.
The toner of the KM6501 is less shiney and more like lithos inks whilst the Xerox 700 is shiny. Maybe some people like this gloss, but I want to make the product as indistinguishable as possible from my litho produced goods.
A demo of the highly acclaimed Xerox 5000 curled my board like a Smarty tube by applying unacceptably high temperatures to the fuser. Worse still the toner is ridiculously shiny with the black almost looking like a virko coating, this of course would disappear under a varnish or laminate. The worse thing about the 5000 is the colour gamut is not as wide as other machines of it's type and the yellow/scarlet grad came out dull and lifeless. This was not down to any rip issues or stray cyan dots but the raw colours of the toner. The magenta toner is more 'bluish' than the bright 'rhodaminish' tones of it's competitors, although you may get better browns!
All in all... I'm going to spend my money on the Konica Minolta C6501. It's marginally more expensive and the click charge is a tiny bit higher but I am focussed on quality and my customers deserve the best and I'll absorb the click charge.
Anyone know anything about UV varnishing and foiling with this kit?
