We are an in-house direct mail shop with a volume of about ~20k / month letter-size color prints. Right now we are still doing this on a 30-ppm office MFP (a Samsung SL-X4300LX). Our letters are inserted into offset printed #10 window envelopes that we order from a local shop.
While the office machine is working ok for our needs now, it probably isn't a long term solution for us as we are getting ready to move to a folded 11x17 sheet for our mailings and we are still seeing our volume increase. We've tried outsourcing the letter printing, but haven't been able to find someone local that can meet our cost/production time requirements yet.
There are a couple of used Konica Minolta C7000 Press units that have popped up for sale locally that we are considering. These units have about 5 million impressions on them but look pretty well taken care of. These are probably overkill for our volume, but assuming we could buy them worth the money, are we just buying ourselves a maintenance headache? We tend to work on our own equipment, but not really sure how much of an option that is on one of these. Prior to looking at these machines we were considering an Oki c931 or Xante Impressia so we could start doing our own envelope printing as well for A/B testing. It appears we would be giving up that option with the C7000, as I don't see a lot of successful reports of running envelopes through these machines.
I saw a KM spec-sheet which put the lifetime of the C7000 at "6,000,000 prints or 5 years". So these would be pretty close to that, but not sure how much stock I should put into that -- it seems awfully low for a machine like this.
If there is a different direction we should be looking at, I'm all ears.
While the office machine is working ok for our needs now, it probably isn't a long term solution for us as we are getting ready to move to a folded 11x17 sheet for our mailings and we are still seeing our volume increase. We've tried outsourcing the letter printing, but haven't been able to find someone local that can meet our cost/production time requirements yet.
There are a couple of used Konica Minolta C7000 Press units that have popped up for sale locally that we are considering. These units have about 5 million impressions on them but look pretty well taken care of. These are probably overkill for our volume, but assuming we could buy them worth the money, are we just buying ourselves a maintenance headache? We tend to work on our own equipment, but not really sure how much of an option that is on one of these. Prior to looking at these machines we were considering an Oki c931 or Xante Impressia so we could start doing our own envelope printing as well for A/B testing. It appears we would be giving up that option with the C7000, as I don't see a lot of successful reports of running envelopes through these machines.
I saw a KM spec-sheet which put the lifetime of the C7000 at "6,000,000 prints or 5 years". So these would be pretty close to that, but not sure how much stock I should put into that -- it seems awfully low for a machine like this.
If there is a different direction we should be looking at, I'm all ears.
