RISO Forcejet HC5500?

[Island]

Anyone run or consider a riso forcejet HC5500 -- are these line inkjets up to the task of general color printing on par with business class color lasers (canon color imagerunners or xerox docucolors), or not quite there yet?

 

[Craig]

I have not run one, but saw one at GraphExpo. I was considering one for printing envelopes, panel cards maybe letterhead. The issue I had was the samples coming out had lines in them, much like a head was clogged in an inkjet printer. The quality is transitional color quality at best, I didn't feel it was up to par with the quality work my shop puts out. My old IRC3200 is much better quality than a HC5500. Too bad though, I liked the concept, but not he results.

 

[Internal_R&D_Analyst]

The HC5500 fills a need for some direct mail applications. Being able to produce 120 pages a minute it is one of the faster digital presses. The inkjet quality is not for everyone so it must be tested. It will be interesting when the quality gets better they have a head start on the high speed sheetfed inkjet market.

 

[JaimeZ]

I've heard that the inkjet technology on the Riso type machines will only get better and better and in about five years it will rival, if not surpass, the toner based technology in quality, with the advantage that it can print items such envelope, which is not possible on most of today's toner based machines.

 

[Internal_R&D_Analyst]

I've heard that they are working on the next HC5500 but that it will be first released in Japan and then later on to the US. The device is built through a partnership with Toshiba and Olympus.

For those that went to Drupa, and yes I realize they were just technology demonstrations, the sheetfed inkjet machines from Fuji and Screen are way further along then the Riso quality available today, although they these two new ones are coating the stock inline to improve the quality. While Riso was not showing at all Olympus showed a narrow web press.

Moving forward to Graph Expo this year PSI Engineering was there with their machine(Oki Data) they have had for a while to print envelopes. Xante showed their new envelope printer (also starts out as an Oki Data) to print color envelopes as well. The envelope side of digital printing has been lagging for some time now with the only other system I am aware of is from MGI and their envelope feeder that can be mounted onto the DP40 or DP60. Though you could buy a room full of Oki based machines for the cost of one MGI machine for dedicated envelope production. The one advantage of the $225,000+ MGI is that they can bleed on 3 sides while the under $15,000 Oki printers can't bleed at all.