Wow, you Xerox and Cannon guys sure seem to have a lot of service calls...

[TheProcessIStheproduct]

Let me preface by saying I am more of a traditional press guy. But we put in an Indigo last year and I have had a couple phone sessions and only one boots on the ground service call. I read threads of people having upwards of 10-12 calls a month on 50-75k in impressions, how do you make money being down every other day?

Don't get me wrong, I am not a believer in magic bullets and think that the Indigo does have issues, namely adhesion and does require someone who knows what they are doing, but if your applications support it, I have not seen anything that will run 30,000 sheets of 120# cover in a day and not break a sweat or need a service call the next day....

 

[Josh]

I agree, the Indigos are a great piece of kit, however...

The service arrangements on an Indigo vs Xerox (for example) are dramatically different.

To be comparing like with like the only Xerox's in the same price bracket as Indigo's are the 7/800/2's, 800/1000s and iGen3/4s.

With the shared servicing on an Indigo you're going to be paying a fixed service cost each month which is almost the same amount as an operators salary. This is in addition to the costs involved in getting 1-2 operators trained to Level 2 status.

We have a Xerox and yes you're correct we do have a lot of service calls, however these don't put the machine out of action for days at a time, you're talking a couple of hours (tops) most of the time. And for the majority of the calls the machine isn't completely out of action it will be more of "preventative" call, or one to fix an issue which is affecting a particular job.

So to answer your question:

I can't believe any of the above Xerox machines are down every other day (and if they are I can't believe it would be for more than an hour or 2)

When you work out the daily maintenance an Indigo would have I'd guess this would cancel this time out anyway.

When you take into account the additional fixed maintenance costs, training costs and actual page costs on the Indigo the majority of other machines will work out cheaper.

So that's how we'd make money.

Is the Indigo worth the extra money for the additional quality? Well I guess that depends on your application. I'd put it out there that for the vast majority of commerical applications it isn't.

 

[TheProcessIStheproduct]

mine is bigger than yours...

mine is bigger than yours...

Don't get me wrong, the Indigo costs are high, way high, too high, and it is not my intent to get in a "mine is bigger than yours" conversation, rather, more of an academic discussion as to WHY can't the big players come up with a solution that does not need a steady stream of service. I personally hate when techs come into my shop; disruptions, stops production, kills rush jobs...

I would love a plastic box that I can pay a kid $10 bucks and hour to throw paper at it and get commercially except-able quality and UPTIME 90-95%. If someone can do that, I will push my Indigo off the loading dock into the dumpster...

 

[ondemandbindery]

Don't get me wrong, the Indigo costs are high, way high, too high, and it is not my intent to get in a "mine is bigger than yours" conversation, rather, more of an academic discussion as to WHY can't the big players come up with a solution that does not need a steady stream of service. I personally hate when techs come into my shop; disruptions, stops production, kills rush jobs...

I would love a plastic box that I can pay a kid $10 bucks and hour to throw paper at it and get commercially except-able quality and UPTIME 90-95%. If someone can do that, I will push my Indigo off the loading dock into the dumpster...

I posted somewhat of a similar question on another thread today. But yes, how do you make money with your equipment with too much down time due to problems? I only finish work in the Printing Industry but if my equipment was down as much as some of these posts are showing, I would flat be out of business. Are people just blowing smoke or are these just isolated situations?

 

[msaeger]

I would love a plastic box that I can pay a kid $10 bucks and hour to throw paper at it and get commercially except-able quality and UPTIME 90-95%. If someone can do that, I will push my Indigo off the loading dock into the dumpster...

If that existed why would businesses bring in their printing instead of just printing it themselves. You don't want it to be too easy.

 

[che.c]

Most of these photocopiers have quite a high uptime. I believe that this forum would give you a skewed perspective - most people post on here to ask for help/complain and rarely are there "I love my printer, it works so well" kind of posts.

A skilled operator can workaround/fix most of the image quality issues, or at least do a lot of the leg work in diagnosing them to reduce downtime.

However, I also believe that, like with cars, there are just some lemons. Some printers built on a Friday afternoon which just give nothing but frustration and spoiled jobs to their unfortunate owners, as well as ALL models from ALL manufacturers needing a lot of problems ironed out after their release. Techs will say this themselves - you just don't know how it's going to perform until it hits real production.

Last thing is, most of these photocopier style machines are flogged all day, every day. They rarely have a set maintenance routine and they are worked until they break - if you tried that with an Indigo it would turn into a pig a lot quicker than any KM/Canon/Xerox/Ricoh offering.

PS - I've looked at the Indigo operators forum.. it's not all plain sailing, and pretty complex stuff. That said, very cool machine - if I was planning on making a career of printing that's what I'd want to be running

 

[Craig]

How much of this is related to companies buying on price? I can get 2 of brand X for the price of 1 from brand Y. What I mean is you buy a low end machine, run it at or near its capacity and expect it to hold up from month to month, they just won't.

 

[elfidito]

have you tried the MGI DP60?

 

[arossetti]

You are comparing service of a Indigo against the service call frequency of mid/light production xerox/canon equipment. How many complaints about service calls have you seen on this forum in regards to an Igen4? Those will run 2-3 months without a call no problem. A DC250, X700, DC5000,7000,8000 etc will have a lot more service issues then an Indigo, Nexpress, Igen.

 

[bkaupp]

We have ran two DocuColour 242's for several years in our shop combined they have done about 500k impressions and we have had one service call on one of the machines (resulted from someone running an incompatible transfer paper - fuser change) and only had to work out a few initial kinks on the second as it was a demo machine, but in the 1.5 yr we've had the second we have had only 3 calls on it. The biggest thing we have found for quality is often changing the fuser and image drums sooner then what the machine thinks. Other then that they have been pretty rock solid machines, perhaps we just lucked out twice.

 

[lakai]

tell me about it.. I just bought a Canon IR 7125VP to replace one of my nuvera and its already had 5 calls with less than 50k impressions. I dont even wnat to use the thing anymore