mid production b&w, Oce vs Xerox?

[lfelton]

Well, we've well & truly outgrown our Xerox 4127 so will have to bite the bullet later this year. The Oce 6160 / 6200 / 6250 (all physically the same I think, just software speed limits) are very impressive, but I have some residual loyalty to our Xerox dealer who has dealt fairly with us (not always a given in business, so valued by me). The equivalent Xerox would appear to be the Nuvera 200PPS. Is anyone running one of those who can clue me in on whether the Nuvera is worth the extra cash? I know that the print quality is better, but in my mind that's more than balanced out by Oce's completely flat sheet output. Has Oce just eaten Xerox's lunch in the B&W mid production area (as Oce claim ) or are there big pluses on the Xerox side that outweigh the extra cost and wavy sheets?

 

[benny123]

I hear nothing but bad stories re the nuvera series. I would not personally say the quality is better than the oce either from what i have seen. I think Oce dominate the production b&w space with good reason, they have the best kit. The Canon iPR1135 is worth a look too if quality is important. I think the print quality and halftones are very good on this.

 

[JoshB]

If one machine was clearly better than another, then there would pretty quickly only be one machine. Period.

What sort of things are you printing? What are you doing with the machines? What do you expect out of them?

 

[lfelton]

If one machine was clearly better than another, then there would pretty quickly only be one machine. Period.

What sort of things are you printing? What are you doing with the machines? What do you expect out of them?

What do you use Josh? To answer your question: mainly books, manuals and training course material. To date, I haven't been interested in inline finishing as we have all the toys in our finishing department. I'm wondering whether to revisit that decision though - what's your experience? What I need / expect is a big jump up in speed using SRA3 sheets and a machine that is capable of roughly 250-500K b&w SRA3 clicks a month (250K being roughly where we are). I also need dead flat sheets to bind! Am I missing some tricks Josh, what else should I be looking for?

 

[JoshB]

We print books on Oce, though color is done through Xerox.

It sounds to me like Oce would be a good choice for you. I'd have to disagree with earlier posts saying that there isn't a quality difference between Oce and Xerox. The newer Nuvera (emulsified toner) seems to me to have exceptional quality which is superior in every way to any competing machine on the market.

For training manual level quality, the Oce will be more than sufficient. Really if you're keep up on the maintenance, Oce should be fine for anything that isn't a black and white art book. They undoubtedly are very productive machines. I would suggest, however, that you should be sure to print a long run of a few of your books through both machines sticking as close to your final production process as possible. There were hidden "gotchas" in both machines for us.

For the Oce 6250, the RIP often had serious trouble keeping up (we do POD, so this might not be an issue for you if you print short run). The Oce also has a regular cleaning cycle that they don't tell you about which will slow you down -- the speeds they quote pretend that this cleaning cycle doesn't exist. The cleaning cycle wastes about 30 seconds everything few minutes -- exactly how long depends on a setting on the machine.

The Xerox RIP is dramatically superior in my brief experience, but we were slowed in another way during testing. They recently expanded the max sheet size for the Nuvera, which was very nice for us. Unfortunately, they didn't change the image drum size when they did this, so going above a certain sheet size (I don't remember exactly what) scraps a usable frame from the drum and this drops the production speed by about 30%. I don't think this affects SRA3, but you make certain.

Never believe the marketing. I'd schedule a demo for the morning and bring your own paper, because it seems that if you depend on the demo room to get things right then they're always running a little short on paper, and the introduction from the sales guy always takes a bit longer than expected so the demo room is closing soon. Test, test, test. Don't believe anything you're told until you see it yourself and make sure that you will be able to see everything you need.

 

[benny123]

Never believe the marketing. I'd schedule a demo for the morning and bring your own paper, because it seems that if you depend on the demo room to get things right then they're always running a little short on paper, and the introduction from the sales guy always takes a bit longer than expected so the demo room is closing soon. Test, test, test. Don't believe anything you're told until you see it yourself and make sure that you will be able to see everything you need.

This i do agree very much with.

One point re inline finishing if you are considering demo a long run as well as perfect binding etc will slow the engine down as will some other finishing options.

Do have a look at the Canon iPR1135 but my gut feel is the Oce is for you based on above.

 

[JoshB]

Benny makes a great point about finishing, though this will probably be very hard to test. Just as an example of what can happen, we have an unexpected issue where smaller books actually take longer to run than larger books on the Oce. This is because if there is any pause in printing, then the Oce goes through a cool down cycle and everything has to spin up again to print the next book. So, with a short book where finishing takes longer than printing, the printer spins down and this adds an unexpected 12 seconds onto cycle time when we wait for the drum to spin back up.

I'd also try to find some other people using the same hardware in your service area. Their input might be more important than data on "general" reliability of the machines. I think a very large part of your reliability depends on your local techs, so it's probably good to know what's happening specifically in your area.

I will say that for Oce, our experience has been that the machines are reliable. Sometimes we've gone more than a month without having to have a tech in. At the same time there have been a few instances where a machine was down for days (although Oce is always very good about getting parts ASAP, and even flying in a tech if needed).

 

[lfelton]

Thanks for sharing your experience.