jotterpinky
Well-known member
We recently purchased a Xerox D110 to replace an aging Ricoh 1350. We have had several issues that if we had known about we would have definitely purchased something else.
The machine itself seems to be a workhorse, we've run about 750K on it in a month and have seen the technician once. (granted, it's new). However the problems all seem to be software driven. We did not purchase this with an external RIP which I believe would alleviate our problems but apparently they are near and dear to Xerox whom is quoting us roughly 18K for a Fiery RIP. We've usually don't put external RIPs on our Black and white machines as we find it not worth the extra money. It appears though that Xerox is not going to allow anyone but general office users to get by without the external RIP though. These are the issues that I've noticed.
1. The driver seems to be very buggy and featureless. This is for both the Postscript and PCL drivers. I've installed this on three different computers and all have the same problem. Printing Letter size sheets seems to be okay but when we want to print tabloid (11x17) we're seeing all sorts of weird behavior. For example on a document that is 150 pages long it you try to print the entire thing it spools away in windows and you can actually see on the printer that it's "processing". As soon as it spools off though the document disappears, it's not at the printer and doesn't even show an error message in the log. You can print like this all day and never generate a single sheet. However to work around this issue we've noticed that you can resend the file but only send about 25-50 pages of it (same print settings, only change was the sheets selected to print) and it starts printing almost immediately. If we want to print the whole document we queue it up and print pages 1-50, then print 51-100, then print 101-150, etc. VERY time consuming. Other issues we initially saw were errors anytime we printed a document and it thought the paper was mismatched instead of prompting for another tray or size it simply deleted the job with out so much as a beep (we've since found out how to turn on the sound) but the problem persisted until we changed the port settings and disabled SNMP (bidirectional communication). The driver likes to be smart and allow you to select paper by "color", "size", "tray", etc. This is fine and dandy except it will exhibit the above behavior unless you select by tray AND SNMP is turned off. Disabling SNMP prevents the paper tray updating with the correct stock type currently loaded but it's not a feature we are in the slightest bit interested in preferring instead to have the operator know what paper they've loaded and which tray it's in. Again it seems like this is definitely OFFICE work only for untrained lackeys who like extra "features".
2. One of our main reasons we don't purchase external RIPs on these black and white machines is because we like using the Mailbox which is how we normally like to print our documents since many of them are re-prints from prior orders and it's very simple to go to the printer and queue up the job. We like to name our mailboxes by customer and all standard repeat forms orders etc are kept there, it's also nice to print to the mailbox, go to the machine and queue up one copy to check alignment, duplexing, quality etc. and then queue up the remainder of the job after making sure everything is right. We've used this same method on every black and white copier we've owned since they went from analog to digital. The Xerox D110 though artificially limits what you are able to do with the mailbox.
For instance when sending a job via the postscript driver you have the option to select "high speed vs high resolution" and a choice of selecting from 4-5 different line screen rulings (the coarsest being 85 and the highest 212 lpi) I think the 85lpi is too coarse and prefer to go with something like 150lpi for a good balance of grays and quality. The problem arises when you send to the mailbox. It doesn't allow you to select either "high speed / high resolution". However you can select the line screen which is really all I want anyway. You can send the job to the mailbox with 150 line screen, when you go to the mailbox and queue up the job though it will only print at 85 lpi, and looks very coarse. We've played with this for quite a while to no avail.
Another limitation of the mailbox is the ability to add covers AND PRINT ON THEM. We thought this was a no-brainer and thought we had some setting wrong. Unfortunately there is no way around this, the screen even warns you when you select a job in the mailbox and choose "front cover" that there will NOT BE any printing on the cover. The best you can do is insert blank covers or preprint the cover and then insert them through the interposer. Again, an extra step that could be, and has been, avoided on all other digital printers I've used.
Finally with regard to the mailbox it appears to re-rip the job whenever you go in to reprint a file. All other machines I've used apparently store ripped data of the job and after selecting a job in the mailbox (i.e. document server) they start printing within seconds. Not so with the Xerox D110. It gives a screen that shows the percentage that it's loaded/ripped and doesn't start printing until the entire file loads. Not bad if the job is only 2 pages but when its 800+ pages (which some of our documents are) it could take as much as 10 minutes to reprocess and start printing, during which we idly sit twiddling our thumbs. It has the option to change settings such as which tray to use and if you want to duplex etc., funny thing is that while you can save these settings with the job it has to re-rip the entire job which takes another ten minutes, just to save the double sided setting with the job! It's almost faster to just print directly from the driver again on the computer, of course these settings aren't available if you choose the mailbox as your output method, it assumes you'll change this on the printer when you print the job.
I'm sure with time we'll grow to love it but in the meantime we avoid using it and send jobs to either our Ricoh 1107ex or Canon iR7095.
Sorry for the rant but it has really gotten my hair up that something like this could have been built with apparent "software limitations" that appear to either drive one to drink or to purchase the external RIP at their high rates.
The machine itself seems to be a workhorse, we've run about 750K on it in a month and have seen the technician once. (granted, it's new). However the problems all seem to be software driven. We did not purchase this with an external RIP which I believe would alleviate our problems but apparently they are near and dear to Xerox whom is quoting us roughly 18K for a Fiery RIP. We've usually don't put external RIPs on our Black and white machines as we find it not worth the extra money. It appears though that Xerox is not going to allow anyone but general office users to get by without the external RIP though. These are the issues that I've noticed.
1. The driver seems to be very buggy and featureless. This is for both the Postscript and PCL drivers. I've installed this on three different computers and all have the same problem. Printing Letter size sheets seems to be okay but when we want to print tabloid (11x17) we're seeing all sorts of weird behavior. For example on a document that is 150 pages long it you try to print the entire thing it spools away in windows and you can actually see on the printer that it's "processing". As soon as it spools off though the document disappears, it's not at the printer and doesn't even show an error message in the log. You can print like this all day and never generate a single sheet. However to work around this issue we've noticed that you can resend the file but only send about 25-50 pages of it (same print settings, only change was the sheets selected to print) and it starts printing almost immediately. If we want to print the whole document we queue it up and print pages 1-50, then print 51-100, then print 101-150, etc. VERY time consuming. Other issues we initially saw were errors anytime we printed a document and it thought the paper was mismatched instead of prompting for another tray or size it simply deleted the job with out so much as a beep (we've since found out how to turn on the sound) but the problem persisted until we changed the port settings and disabled SNMP (bidirectional communication). The driver likes to be smart and allow you to select paper by "color", "size", "tray", etc. This is fine and dandy except it will exhibit the above behavior unless you select by tray AND SNMP is turned off. Disabling SNMP prevents the paper tray updating with the correct stock type currently loaded but it's not a feature we are in the slightest bit interested in preferring instead to have the operator know what paper they've loaded and which tray it's in. Again it seems like this is definitely OFFICE work only for untrained lackeys who like extra "features".
2. One of our main reasons we don't purchase external RIPs on these black and white machines is because we like using the Mailbox which is how we normally like to print our documents since many of them are re-prints from prior orders and it's very simple to go to the printer and queue up the job. We like to name our mailboxes by customer and all standard repeat forms orders etc are kept there, it's also nice to print to the mailbox, go to the machine and queue up one copy to check alignment, duplexing, quality etc. and then queue up the remainder of the job after making sure everything is right. We've used this same method on every black and white copier we've owned since they went from analog to digital. The Xerox D110 though artificially limits what you are able to do with the mailbox.
For instance when sending a job via the postscript driver you have the option to select "high speed vs high resolution" and a choice of selecting from 4-5 different line screen rulings (the coarsest being 85 and the highest 212 lpi) I think the 85lpi is too coarse and prefer to go with something like 150lpi for a good balance of grays and quality. The problem arises when you send to the mailbox. It doesn't allow you to select either "high speed / high resolution". However you can select the line screen which is really all I want anyway. You can send the job to the mailbox with 150 line screen, when you go to the mailbox and queue up the job though it will only print at 85 lpi, and looks very coarse. We've played with this for quite a while to no avail.
Another limitation of the mailbox is the ability to add covers AND PRINT ON THEM. We thought this was a no-brainer and thought we had some setting wrong. Unfortunately there is no way around this, the screen even warns you when you select a job in the mailbox and choose "front cover" that there will NOT BE any printing on the cover. The best you can do is insert blank covers or preprint the cover and then insert them through the interposer. Again, an extra step that could be, and has been, avoided on all other digital printers I've used.
Finally with regard to the mailbox it appears to re-rip the job whenever you go in to reprint a file. All other machines I've used apparently store ripped data of the job and after selecting a job in the mailbox (i.e. document server) they start printing within seconds. Not so with the Xerox D110. It gives a screen that shows the percentage that it's loaded/ripped and doesn't start printing until the entire file loads. Not bad if the job is only 2 pages but when its 800+ pages (which some of our documents are) it could take as much as 10 minutes to reprocess and start printing, during which we idly sit twiddling our thumbs. It has the option to change settings such as which tray to use and if you want to duplex etc., funny thing is that while you can save these settings with the job it has to re-rip the entire job which takes another ten minutes, just to save the double sided setting with the job! It's almost faster to just print directly from the driver again on the computer, of course these settings aren't available if you choose the mailbox as your output method, it assumes you'll change this on the printer when you print the job.
I'm sure with time we'll grow to love it but in the meantime we avoid using it and send jobs to either our Ricoh 1107ex or Canon iR7095.
Sorry for the rant but it has really gotten my hair up that something like this could have been built with apparent "software limitations" that appear to either drive one to drink or to purchase the external RIP at their high rates.
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