Disclaimer: I always refer to LARGE clicks.
We went for the canon for a couple of reasons.
Currently we own a X240 (halfway into a 5 year lease). With this machine we grew our volume from 10.000 per month on a DC12 (Yes... loooong nights printing at 4 ppm) to about 40K per month. At this point we're seeing the Xerox techs too often, and we're running into issues where we have to lower our level of quality, based on what the machine is producing.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the machine, we're just working it at it's upper bound, and doing all that it can do. The techs come, they fix it (They are all very nice, knowledgeable people), and life goes on, until we have to call again 4 days later.
So obviously we need to upgrade. Xerox came in with two proposals, one for the 700, and one for the 5000.
I'd say 90% of the time we run Coated 12Pt 13 x 19, so the 700, while cheaper, could not duplex our main product. This was probably the biggest struggle we had when taking the decision. Should we continue manually duplexing, or bite the bullet and go with a higher end machine. The other was that the 700's sweet spot is 35.000 LETTER SIZE impresions per month, on plain paper, so we were concerned that we'll outgrow the machine too soon into the lease.
In the end we decided to go for broke, and look at the 5000. The price was obviously higher, but it was a faster and more reliable machine.
The things that we didn't like about the 5000 were the facts that it can't run 13" wide paper. It only goes to 12.6 with a guaranteed image area of 12". That was a big turn off for us right there, since we've centered our production around 13 x 19. Second was the fact that it uses fuser oil. Remember, the world is divided into two groups, those who love it, and those who hate it. We're in the latter group.
I looked at Konica's C6501, but didn't like the quality of the printing that much (If you're clients aren't picky, it is a *very* solid piece of equipment), Rico's 900 was out of our league.
Canon seems to be in the sweet spot for us right now. It runs 13 x 19, duplexes 300Gsm, and as stated above, it should give us the right amount of room to grow without overspending money.
We tested for lamination, and it works flawlessly (We will now start offering silk laminated products), and one thing we really liked about the machine is that it uses a side registration guide. That means that we can do a number of things that just aren't possible (I should rather say that have a lot of waste) using centerline registration. Foil stamping, die-cutting, embossing, precision folding, etc.
Those are the rational motives...
I'd like to add the irrational ones now;
Out of all the people that we dealt with (Konica, Canon, ricoh, etc) The xerox sales team were the most unprofessional, and obnoxious of the bunch. I'm not saying that this applies to everybody else. Just the particular two that we had to deal with.
Since we've had all xerox machines here for the last 10 years, they walked in thinking it was a done deal. Their attitude was not the nicest in the world, and they kept trying to hide things and generally muddle up the proposals presented.
To their credit, once they realized that they were losing the deal to canon, their attitudes changed, but still, you can't just forget about the first three months of dealings...
