Looking to replace Canon Imagepress 6000 - need suggestions

[telehead]

Hello all, I'm the owner of a seasonal company that does our own inhouse marketing that does 2M clicks per year. Since we are seasonal and our business spikes from Oct-Dec and March - May, our printers need to stay up as close to 100% of that time as possible. Sadly that's not the case.

My environment has 3 Imagepress 6000 that have severe reliability issues (of course always during my heavy months). We have 3 to distribute load, meet capacity, and serve as backup to each other. Problem is one or the other is down pretty much every day. (Have one now that has been down going on 3 days while waiting on a part). In the past 4 weeks, we have put in over 10 service calls ranging from bad fuser to color dropouts. I've seen it all in the past 3 years and I've reached the end of my patience.

So, we're looking to make a change and was wondering if anyone could offer some suggestions for replacements. I'm looking at HP Indigo, Xerox iGen3 or 4, Xerox XC1000, NexPress SE, and KonicaMinolta bizhub Press C7000.

I need speed but more importantly, reliability. Is it possible to have a production digital press that at least gives consistent reliability? Because right now, I don't have them.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CathieH]

Hi telehead.

I understand your problems with Canon service. Someone in my office has a neighbor that used to be a Canon tech and he left to go to All Copy Products (a distributor out of Colo. and Ariz.) because he said there just weren't enough techs and he was working horrible, long hours.

My personal experience is limited to Xerox and KM (through All Copy) and have received great repair times for both. Although my machines do go down, it's usually not every three days, although that does happen, the response and repair time don't set me back too much, an hour or two at most. I've never had to wait 24 hours.

Sorry I couldn't help much, but thought I'd share what little experience I've had with the two machines.

Cathie

 

[telehead]

We definitely treat their service techs as conquering heroes. We know their pain.

Their service managers, and sales reps, different story. We hold them with equal disdain because we keep hearing the same old responses on how to rectify our issues over and over.

So, we're going to start investigating other options.

If you don't mind sharing Cathie, what is your downtime experiences?

 

[CathieH]

I agree, techs are truly the heroes. Luckily, because we're purchasing a KM C6501 to replace our KM C500, I haven't had to deal with the reps or numbers. That's all my boss's responsibility and I just get to play with the goodies - the machines and the software.

Anyway, our KM C500 hasn't had a lot of downtime. Mostly they were feed issues and static problems, but it's an old machine. When I started (Feb. 2), I immediately ran out and got a big humidifier and some Static Guard and that has helped a lot. We also have a KM C1050, a black only workhorse, and it went down yesterday and today. However, it's been running great and putting out a lot of work over the past two to three weeks without fail.

So, with that said, when we call for service we generally have someone here within two hours. I called for service at 8 this morning for the 1040, it's 10:10 and the tech has been here for about 40 minutes. I also like the way they tend to hang around while I run jobs to make sure everything is running smoothly. However, it obviously didn't work yesterday as I had to have another tech out again today for the same machine.