Ricoh 7210 vs Versant 2100...

kdw75

Well-known member
We got our Ricoh printers setup and have been using them for a little over a week. We also have a Versant 2100 that we have put about 5.5 million clicks on sitting next to them. So far I have noticed a couple of things worth noting that I thought might interest people in the market.

1. The image quality of both machines when new were almost identical, but the Ricoh does screens better than our 2100 ever has. Even with modifications to improve banding, the Ricoh hands down does better with screening. As far as gradient smoothness and pure resolution, I really can't tell much difference. Overall the Ricoh looks more like our offset press.

2. Registration is the biggest difference. Our 2100 had to be adjusted regularly depending on the coverage of the job. If you ran a job with heavy toner on the outboard edge and then ran another job with heavy coverage on the inboard edge you would have to adjust the skew to get front to back alignment dialed back in. I spend so much time doing this on brochures. With the Ricoh you adjust it and it stays put regardless of the toner coverage. I am simply amazed. Oddly enough though there are tons of adjustments, more than on the Xerox, but no skew adjustment. I haven't needed one, but it seems odd not to have it.

3. Speed is where the 2100 shines. It runs at full rated speed pretty much all of the time. You run 2500 sheets and it will run all of them without skipping a beat. Yes, it may delay once or twice to do whatever it needs internally, but rarely. It tends to save that for the end of the job. The Ricoh on the other hand seems to spend more time doing adjustments and this means it will run some sheets then hesitate for a moment. This primarily seems to be the case on heavy gloss cover from what I can tell. I will have to time a long run and see how much exactly this affects output speeds.

4. Paper feeding is a strong suit of the Ricoh. With the vacuum feed it keeps churning out the work. Like I mentioned before the 2100 might be a little faster, but it suffered more from jams on some stocks. The Ricoh just chews through anything we put into it. The 2100 is a little easier to clear paper jams on, but the Ricoh has fewer of them and has LEDs that light up showing you where the paper is jammed, plus has a schematic on screen showing the jammed paper along the paper path.

5. Color consistency is another place where the Ricoh shines. Our 2100 ran really dirty and we had to constantly clean the sensory that read the test patches on the IBT to keep color accurate. The Ricoh runs so cleanly that I have yet to see any toner inside the machine around the fusing area after almost 100,000 impressions. Color has been extremely stable. When profiling our average variation was a less than 1 Delta E where on the best of days our 2100 had an average variation of 2-3 dE.

If there was a single thing that I wish the Ricoh had, it would be the button on our 2100 for adjusting curl. I would regularly see paper coming out curled up or down and adjust it on the fly. On the Ricoh you have to do it under paper settings.

I also notice the Ricoh seems to give you far more settings to play with. You can adjust pretty much anything you might imagine in regard to the feeding or printing of the machine. More settings than I will ever use. I like the fact that they give the operator options even if most will never use them.

Considering the Ricoh was less expensive to boot we are happy we gave them a shot. Time will tell how it holds up and if they are still putting out good looking prints after 4 or 5 million impressions. We do about 150,000 12x19 inch impressions per month.
 
The vacuum feed on the Ricohs' is awesome, once you get a paper dialed in you should have very few jams, and once you get used to clearing the rare jams it won't take long. You will figure out which knobs to turn and how to best turn them to get the paper just right to pull out without ripping them, once you get that down it takes maybe 2 minutes to clear full system jams.

I am even able to run small thin paper newsprint jobs on mine, still amazes me it feeds it.

You shouldn't have to worry with curl much once you get it dialed in, did you get the decurl unit and the buffer pass?
 
We got the buffer pass, but I am not sure about the decurl. Is it a standalone piece?
 

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[h=3]Decurl Unit DU5060[/h] Recommended with medias prone to curl or in high humidity environments. The decurl unit is required when a Stacker is included in the configuration. The decurl unit is needed when printing Carbonless Paper.
 
Thanks for sharing kdw75 ! This is some great real world feedback that can help all of us when looking at the options out there. It's very helpful that you can test two brands side by side like this.
 
After doing some research, I found that there is a setting for each paper type that is kind of buried allowing you to set print speed to high medium or low and on the 270gsm gloss it defaults to a lower speed for the best quality. If you turn this up to high it stops the delays I mentioned.

Didn't want to unfairly misrepresent the speed, so I thought I would mention this.
 
The paper catalog is quite a bit of a learning curve since it has so many settings, many of the settings I still have no idea what they do since I have not had to mess with them.
 
So how does the banding on the Ricoh compare to the Versant? Especially image drum banding.

One other thing that I have the most trouble with on the Versant both the 2100 and now the 3100 is the banding caused by the what I think is vibration caused by duplexing heavy cover stock. I can minimize it some by adjust side one paper curl but never totally eliminate it.
 
We got the buffer pass, but I am not sure about the decurl. Is it a standalone piece?

The decurler is an option and is installed inside the printer at the exit. I would expect with that configuration you would have it. You should be able to adjust it under the adjustment for operator tab. I believe you can do it while the machine is running you could on the 7100 anyway. http://support.ricoh.com/bb_v1oi/pub_e/oi_view/0001074/0001074198/view/adjustment/int/0027.htm

Do you see the curl change when you adjust the settings?
 
After doing some research, I found that there is a setting for each paper type that is kind of buried allowing you to set print speed to high medium or low and on the 270gsm gloss it defaults to a lower speed for the best quality. If you turn this up to high it stops the delays I mentioned.

Didn't want to unfairly misrepresent the speed, so I thought I would mention this.

Yes I see sometimes if you grab a pre made paper from the paper library they will have it set to run slower but you can alway try changing the settings back to high and see if it causes an issue. Another one that will slow it down is paper feed interval which is how much space is between the sheets.
http://support.ricoh.com/bb_v1oi/pub_e/oi_view/0001074/0001074198/view/adjustment/int/0199.htm
 
So how does the banding on the Ricoh compare to the Versant? Especially image drum banding.

One other thing that I have the most trouble with on the Versant both the 2100 and now the 3100 is the banding caused by the what I think is vibration caused by duplexing heavy cover stock. I can minimize it some by adjust side one paper curl but never totally eliminate it.

I am not seeing any banding at all on the Ricohs. Our 2100 has never been totally free of banding, but it has gotten better and worse over the years. They put a flywheel on the machine and claimed that would fix it as well as replacing a bunch of motors and other parts, but were never able to eliminate it. We have clients that love to run large solids in varying colors and to help eliminate banding on our 2100 we would set the screening to "150 Line" which sometimes helped.
 
The decurler is an option and is installed inside the printer at the exit. I would expect with that configuration you would have it. You should be able to adjust it under the adjustment for operator tab. I believe you can do it while the machine is running you could on the 7100 anyway. http://support.ricoh.com/bb_v1oi/pub_e/oi_view/0001074/0001074198/view/adjustment/int/0027.htm

Do you see the curl change when you adjust the settings?

Yes, both machines let you adjust curl under paper settings.
 
I didn't have banding on my 7100's when I first got them, one started getting it 1 year in and the other at 3 years in. I am currently having huge issues with cyan banding, the tech is now waiting on rear gears to come in to try and replace to see if that fixes it.

Make sure and make some samples now and put them away preferably in a sealed container so down the road you can reference back to them when the tech says "this machine always did this".
 
I didn't have banding on my 7100's when I first got them, one started getting it 1 year in and the other at 3 years in. I am currently having huge issues with cyan banding, the tech is now waiting on rear gears to come in to try and replace to see if that fixes it.

Make sure and make some samples now and put them away preferably in a sealed container so down the road you can reference back to them when the tech says "this machine always did this".

I will do that. When we purchased these I had the salesman print samples of our jobs with large screened areas and told him that we had to have banding free prints. I can understand a machine developing banding because something wore out. What griped me was that the 2100 had it since new and Xerox was never able to satisfactorily fix it. We had to put demanding work on our C75, which didn't have the banding.
 
The Ricohs seem to run hotter than the Versant and you can't get by with standard window envelopes like we could on the Versant. Other than that, very happy.
 
Is this option (decurler) really important?
I have been offered a used 7100 without a decurler and I'm not sure if I should buy it. We are not a print shop, we are a design studio and we print very low coverage (2% max duplex) but on very thin paper (65gsm), we never print images for this application, the paper is special so we can not change it. This machine might seem an overkill for a design studio but our print volume is 60k per month.
 
Is this option (decurler) really important?
I have been offered a used 7100 without a decurler and I'm not sure if I should buy it. We are not a print shop, we are a design studio and we print very low coverage (2% max duplex) but on very thin paper (65gsm), we never print images for this application, the paper is special so we can not change it. This machine might seem an overkill for a design studio but our print volume is 60k per month.

You can always add the decurler later if you need it. It only flattens the sheets when they exit the machine so it really only helps for things like booklet makers and helping the sheets to stack well. I wouldn't let the machine having a decurler or not affect your purchasing decision.
 
@kdw75 Do you mind sharing your envelope settings for #10 non-window envelopes. I am using the upper bypass tray to feed them but getting dog earing on them when they come out on the shift tray. I am also feeding them short edge first.
 

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