We've been running a C75 for about four months now. We've put in probably about two dozen service calls since then, mostly due to bad developer housings. These are the same developer housings as the 700 uses and have been problematic for many people. This is still an ongoing issue for us and we had two technicians in from 11am to 4:30pm yesterday working on it. We just had our 700-style housings replaced with DC5000-style housings and the issue has improved but it's off to second and third-level support to figure out a real fix.
That said, when its working properly it's a bit faster, got better print quality and offers a lot more options than the 700 which is our second machine. Never used a 560 but it's certainly faster than the old 242/260 units we had. For stuff like 40-300 sheet business card runs, 500 sheet posters etc the print speed has never seemed as important as the time it takes to get desired print quality. I've had to do a lot of tinkering and calibration to cut down on this time.
The C75 lets you choose between 600/1200 dpi print resolution. From personal experience if we're having trouble with a gradient that doesn't look good in digital, switching to the 1200dpi setting will introduce a visible rosette pattern that really helps the gradation look better. Trade-off is some type, especially thin type, can appear slightly more jagged. Still a useful technique to have available to the operator because it works well in a lot of situations.
Offers a bunch of screen modes that I never saw on the 700 or 242/260 machines. Enhanced Text, Enhanced Text & Graphics, 150 dot, 200 dot, 300 dot, 200 line, 600 dot, stochastic. I played with all of these pretty extensively when we got started and I only really use 2 every day and 1 for special occasions. 300 dot has been my go-to for most things as it packs in more dots than the default Enhanced Text, resulting in higher density solids and more detail in photos. Setting the print resolution to 1200dpi to enhance gradients restricts you to either Enhanced Text or Enhanced Text & Graphics.. I'll usually go for Enhanced Text as the dot pattern looks best. Stochastic is a great idea and I've occasionally used it for big detailed photos but it changes colours so drastically that it's usually more trouble than it's worth - and the resulting look has been something that people either love or hate. Every screen mode setting has an effect on colour. Between 300 dot and Enhanced Text you won't see a lot of difference but every other option will require adjustments.
Allows you to duplex up to 80lb cover in the trays, and will duplex 100lb cover in the bypass. It is completely terrible at feeding coated stock of any kind through the bottom trays though and will pull in 4 to 8 sheets of 80lb gloss cover through the rollers, potentially damaging everything along the way. If you run a lot of coated stock consider investing in the oversize feeder option.. we didn't go that route so I must feed all coated stock through the bypass tray and fan it out before I load it. It's nice being able to load the trays up with 80lb uncoated cover and just let it run when the situation allows for it.
Front/Back registration is excellent and very consistent if your technician is thorough and really calibrates everything nicely for you. Out of the box it was pretty bad but there is a piece of software called SIQA you can ask for that allows you to scan a template and automatically create pretty good alignment profiles in a fraction of the time it takes to set this up manually. SIQA was only available for PC at the time we got our C75 set up.
