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.
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.
