Which B&W Production Printer to buy?

[aumujumdar]

Hi,

I am book publisher and looking for a B&W digital printing machine for in-house printing work. I am having below three options to choose from. Please do suggest which machine is best option.

1. Ricoh Pro 8120S
2. Konika Minolta Buizhubpress 1250
3. Canon Imagepress 1135

Looking for your valuable suggestions.

Thanks.

Amit

 

[Midwestprinter]

We have the Konica 1250 and its a solid workhorse. We keep it running nearly all day everyday with very few problems.

 

[PrintIT]

We've got 2 of the KM 1200's and love em.

(If only they didn't talk us into a C8000 after we got the 1200's!)

 

[Craig]

We have a KM 1200 and maxed it out at 1,060,000/month in a single shift. We average about 400,000 and the thing is a tank. The saddlestitcher is a killer and we run around 40,000 booklets/month. I may get a second one here shortly.

 

[MailGuru]

The KM Pro 1250. Hands-down. It's a good, solid piece of gear. Exceptional print quality. Very reliable with very little down time.
We've had ours for over a year. Run the crap out of it. I think it's been down twice.

-MailGuru

 

[PrintIT]

We have a KM 1200 and maxed it out at 1,060,000/month in a single shift. We average about 400,000 and the thing is a tank. The saddlestitcher is a killer and we run around 40,000 booklets/month. I may get a second one here shortly.

Heh, the stitcher is the one thing about the machine we were never crazy about. As long as it's a small enough booklet you don't need a face trim on it seems OK, but turn that trimmer on and it slows to a CRAWL. We upgraded our offline stitcher to run collated digital sets since we do a ton of color booklets too, so our poor inline stitcher is pretty neglected these days.

 

[aumujumdar]

Thank you all for your views and information.

 

[JustinB]

If you're looking at the Canon had you considered the Oce b&w machine?

 

[LCCPrinting]

Hi,

I am book publisher and looking for a B&W digital printing machine for in-house printing work. I am having below three options to choose from. Please do suggest which machine is best option.

1. Ricoh Pro 8120S
2. Konika Minolta Buizhubpress 1250
3. Canon Imagepress 1135

Looking for your valuable suggestions.

Thanks.

Amit

We are in the same situation and in addition to Ricoh and KM we are also looking at Xerox Nuvera 120 and D125 or D136. How do the Xerox compare to Ricoh and KM? Should we look at an Oce also?

Also thoughts on GBC punch. We do a lot of packets with a coil bind. Our volume runs 200K to 300K per month.

Thanks.

 

[msaeger]

GBC stream punch is great!

 

[JustinB]

I don't have the Oce but I got a demo on it. The black isn't the blackest, but they went to great lengths to eliminate wear parts (Grids, corona wires, fuser section, etc.) so the machine just runs and runs. I have a few local print buddies with them and they all swear by them. One of them is also a book printer and he has had great luck with it.

 

[PrintIT]

We looked at Oce but were quoted a price almost double the KM 1200's - Too much for us.

We have GBC Stream punches on both our 1200's - One of them runs almost constantly for an account that does a TON of GBC binding.
The other one we use sporadically mostly for 3hole binder work.

 

[LCCPrinting]

We were warned by a rep that the GBC stream punch die is a consumable that needs to be changed often. How's your experience with that? We'd be concerned if it needed to be changed more than every 1,000,000 or so.

 

[PrintIT]

The die is a consumable. We have about 12 mil clicks on one machine (that the stream punch isn't that heavily used on) and around 10 mil on the other machine that the punch is used extensively and we've bought one die so far (and we actually still use the old one once in a while if we start getting jams).

 

[Craig]

We maxed a die out at around 3 million punch cycles. Each die is different. We used a 44 hole and they said it would not last as long as a 19 hole comb bind punch.