Good morning. My coworker and I went to see the 7110x yesterday at Ricoh's office in NYC. We demoed it for about 3 hours and got a really good feeling for the machine. Most likely, this will be our next digital production unit.
The machine is a beast. Lots of setting for individual papers. By lots, I mean things that I'm used to changing in service mode, I could change on the stock that I build into the machine. Now I'm coming from a C900 so settings are severely limited in comparison even in service mode.
The machine we saw had 2 large capacity trays. Tray 3 could print 13x27.5", but in the machine it says it could print up to 49". They guys there were not sure what we could do with that setting. We would have tried it if we knew about it previous to going. Printing 27.5" paper was easy with a couple drawbacks. It would not duplex the paper we had. Maybe that was the setting that we had the paper set on, maybe not and the Ricoh guys could not answer that. One other drawback was the tray could not go down to the smallest size of the machine. We asked if we could switch back and forth between long paper and regular paper and were told no.
We brought some felt cardstock with us. It printed very smoothly with a stock setting they already had in the machine. We also brought some #130 Classic Crest Smooth. We printed a job we would normally print on press because of the thickness and quality. It printed with no problems at all and looked very good.
Envelopes. The bane of my existence running digital machines. We brought some #10 envelopes with us. Due to the fact that tray 3 was setup for the longer sheets and could NOT be modified, we had to use Tray 4. Tray 4 could be sized properly to a folded #10. Keep in mind, there was no paper stock built in and I did not have the time to set one up. It jammed when using manual settings. Probably because I manually put in the settings, but I imagine I could get it running with properly setting it up. We unfolded a bunch and it ran perfect.
Now I come to the more important reason we wanted to look at this machine: White and Clear Toner. The machine we saw had the white toner already in and due to time constraints, we could not switch to clear, but from out understanding it is very easy to do it. Takes about 15 minutes.
We brought with us some #130 Strathmore Chocolate. We laid down a white layer and then a CMYK layer. It looked pretty awesome. We saw some samples they had there of white printed on black. One sample was put through once, another twice and one more three times. As you can imagine, the more layers of white, the better it looked, but even after the first pass, I was impressed.
We also brought some 15 pt foil stock to try. We have a video of the machine printing it so we wanted to try ourselves. This stock gave the machine trouble. It jammed on the first due to the default setting of the Fiery being set on duplexed. Once we figured that out, we sent it through correctly and it jammed through the Eject tray. Although it jammed, the white and black toner that we printed on the sheets looked very good and we are excited to try again. With some adjustment, I am sure we could have gotten it to run.
All in all, we were impressed.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to respond here on the thread or email me direct at
[email protected].
EDIT: One thing I forgot was the Carolina 18 pt we tried. 18 pt is 358 gsm I believe. The 7110x maxes out at 360 gsm. It ran that one side only like a trooper.
