Moving Down - Igen to ???

[Jorge Pease]

Our lease was up on our Indigo 5500 some time ago and have opted to add a lower cost press to take some of the load off our iGen4.

Some of our customers are very picky, so I would plan on diverting the less picky customers to one of the following machines.
Konica
Ricoh
Xerox smaller machines

I am dealing direct with Xerox, Konica and Ricoh, service should be ok with all of them in our area.

I keep reading the stories of color shift and registration issues etc and am dreading this move but with new technologies looming only a couple of years away and our volumes rising, the boss would rather tough it out.

I would hope that the machines can handle 100k 12x18 clicks per mo. Substrates most used are 10,12,14 pt C2S and 100#Gloss Text.

Which would give us the best bang for the buck, also specify model, I know some models outperform others so I left out model though it's in our budget to get any of these machines.

Thanks for your comments

 

[PrintIT]

We have a KM 8000 and also a Canon C6000. KM seems to be harder to hit colors from day to day. Canon seems to hold colors better, BUT needs more calibrations run daily to hold them.
With the Konica I can calibrate, run a proof, then 2 days later when the job comes back I'll calibrate and colors will be different. Can always get them back to very close, but it's wasted time playing with the curves/dmax in the Fiery.
Both machines have their good and bad points. It all depends on the type of job which machine it goes on - I would take a good selection of your jobs (especially problematic ones) and have all the vendors run them for you (preferably at a demo site with you in the room to see how many hoops they jump through to make them look good ).

 

[arossetti]

I would say a x1000 with the internal spectro. Calibrates on the fly and adjusts for inboard/outboard color shift etc.

 

[Jorge Pease]

The Konicas interested me because they have a great service model, in our area anyway. They run a tight ship but I don't like to hear about constant color calibrating, that said our old Indigo required about 8 man hours per week for standard maintenance and constantly doing calibrations, quality was excellent though.

I'v heard a few good things about the 1000 ... sounds like this one fits our needs the best. Let's see how motivated xerox is, they don't seem to be very motivated on their iGens.

Thanks for your replies

 

[arossetti]

They were selling them at the same price as an x800, not sure if they still are. Rumor is also that Xerox will be releasing a new 80 PPM press in the fall if you can wait.

 

[Jorge Pease]

They were selling them at the same price as an x800, not sure if they still are. Rumor is also that Xerox will be releasing a new 80 PPM press in the fall if you can wait.

Probably don't want to wait that long.

I got a sort of strange email from them today saying they were going to quit giving me proposals until they got our current iGen running properly. Lately we have been having problems keeping her running, the last 2 months in fact, so every time they have been buy to propose something the machine has been down, it really blew the deal with the ownership.

That is an expensive machine, expectations are much higher and prices are up not down??? They have about priced themselves out of our niche.

Thanks

 

[Craig]

Like for Like the iGen! Just tell the service guy you want to implement the Total Satisfaction Guarantee.

Make sure you look hard at the x1000 maintenance charges, they give you a hefty add for anything over 16".

 

[RobertCrago]

I agree have the owner contact the salesperson and use the Total Satisfaction Guarantee. It is unacceptable that the machine is down so often. Xerox in my area seems very eager to please.