Hi folks, it's been a long long time since I've posted on here. I'm not one for loitering on the digital print forums any more however we just got this new machine installed at our place and the it's performance has moved me to share!
Our old set up was a 700 and a DC260. We rolled the 260 out back and did the kind thing, then got a new J75 in to replace it.
Wow.
What a machine. Xerox has really pulled it out of the bag here. You're talking a machine with the same footprint as a 700 and I think vaguely similar running costs. This is not iGen territory, this isn't even Colour 1000 territory. We're talking equivalent to a KM C6000/7000 price wise.
The install was brilliantly executed by the engineers from Xerox (we recently switched from Danwood) and the machine was ready to rock by the end of the day. The machine is supplied with a Fiery EX, ES-2000 Spectrophotometer and Fiery Colour Profiler Suite. Ours also includes an inline spectro (integrated into the FIM, which is actually now the, erherm, inline cooling unit).
To set the scene this is a busy print shop so work was still going through the 700 while this was happening. I'm the sole operator and am very experienced with the 700, have made it jump through many hoops-a-flaming and am also well acquainted with the service rep screens. This is how J75 and I got along. I spent a wee while reading through some docs and setting up Quick-Access on CWS, set it to our colour workflow up and chose a screen option that could be the same across both machines (I also made sure I wasn't sacrificing quality - there's a lot of choices for the J75).
From here I ran up a profile for Coated board stock, took a few runs at it (they've changed how CPS [Colour Profiler Suite] works) with good results and minimal effort. The ES-2000 is hugely upgraded. The scanning table has an improved ruler which measures the movement speed of the spectro, giving much more consistent results. The ES-2000 itself also now has an RGB LED on top and this tells you of status, successful and failed readings and so on, brilliant feature as those of you who have tried scanning loadsa patches without looking at the screen might realise...
Anyone who has operated a 700 will know that they can have trouble fusing heavy coverage on coated stock... I expected the same behaviour from the J75. Nevertheless, I thought I would chance my arm and set it to Productivity Mode (aka All-Weights - max speed for all stocks) to see what happened. It perfectly fused heavy coverage on a 350gsm Coated board, at the same quality as our 700 does. Only in this case it only took four seconds to duplex.
Four seconds. That's four seconds per full-colour, double sided SRA3 sheet of 350gsm Coated stock. DAMN. Remember the price point of this machine.
If you've run a 700 you will be familiar with the output, the J75 and it are so similar that I was able to run a job proofed weeks ago on our 700 on this machine instead. Since then I've run various jobs and various stocks and it's been quite the performer on all of them, amazing speed and quality on everything, lovely flat uncurled output and no jams.
The philosophy behind this machine is production, there are a lot of points that reflect that and features I've wanted for are included in droves. From the small things like the fuser having tickboxes for the different sizes of paper (use your SRA3 fuser for that, A3 fuser for the other, A4 and so on) that will help you prevent marks to the large hope of SIQA. It seems you can scan your page with crop marks and it automagically generates alignment profiles. You can also correct inboard/outboard density automatically. This promises a lot, I don't have it installed yet as we are waiting on the engineer from England but we'll see...
To be fair the machine is not perfect, I feel that they f*cked the pooch with the UI. For some reason it was redesigned so that you're usually only using a tiny strip in the middle of the screen... much more scrolling. It's by no means intolerable, but it is certainly a shame. Composite overprint also produces some very unusual results. It's early days yet, I've only had the machine running a couple of days and it's still in the honeymoon period, so we'll see.
What I can say is that this machine is strong out of the gate and very impressive. I am inspired enough by its performance to come on here and post for the first time in a long time.
In my print shop we joke about the "big photocopiers" even though they say Digital Press on the front. This machine really is almost worthy of being called a printing press, it spits out the work at a great quality (ready to be immediately worked with, litho guys) and quite the speed. Now if they can only finagle it so that I can adjust registration on the fly...
Our old set up was a 700 and a DC260. We rolled the 260 out back and did the kind thing, then got a new J75 in to replace it.
Wow.
What a machine. Xerox has really pulled it out of the bag here. You're talking a machine with the same footprint as a 700 and I think vaguely similar running costs. This is not iGen territory, this isn't even Colour 1000 territory. We're talking equivalent to a KM C6000/7000 price wise.
The install was brilliantly executed by the engineers from Xerox (we recently switched from Danwood) and the machine was ready to rock by the end of the day. The machine is supplied with a Fiery EX, ES-2000 Spectrophotometer and Fiery Colour Profiler Suite. Ours also includes an inline spectro (integrated into the FIM, which is actually now the, erherm, inline cooling unit).
To set the scene this is a busy print shop so work was still going through the 700 while this was happening. I'm the sole operator and am very experienced with the 700, have made it jump through many hoops-a-flaming and am also well acquainted with the service rep screens. This is how J75 and I got along. I spent a wee while reading through some docs and setting up Quick-Access on CWS, set it to our colour workflow up and chose a screen option that could be the same across both machines (I also made sure I wasn't sacrificing quality - there's a lot of choices for the J75).
From here I ran up a profile for Coated board stock, took a few runs at it (they've changed how CPS [Colour Profiler Suite] works) with good results and minimal effort. The ES-2000 is hugely upgraded. The scanning table has an improved ruler which measures the movement speed of the spectro, giving much more consistent results. The ES-2000 itself also now has an RGB LED on top and this tells you of status, successful and failed readings and so on, brilliant feature as those of you who have tried scanning loadsa patches without looking at the screen might realise...
Anyone who has operated a 700 will know that they can have trouble fusing heavy coverage on coated stock... I expected the same behaviour from the J75. Nevertheless, I thought I would chance my arm and set it to Productivity Mode (aka All-Weights - max speed for all stocks) to see what happened. It perfectly fused heavy coverage on a 350gsm Coated board, at the same quality as our 700 does. Only in this case it only took four seconds to duplex.
Four seconds. That's four seconds per full-colour, double sided SRA3 sheet of 350gsm Coated stock. DAMN. Remember the price point of this machine.
If you've run a 700 you will be familiar with the output, the J75 and it are so similar that I was able to run a job proofed weeks ago on our 700 on this machine instead. Since then I've run various jobs and various stocks and it's been quite the performer on all of them, amazing speed and quality on everything, lovely flat uncurled output and no jams.
The philosophy behind this machine is production, there are a lot of points that reflect that and features I've wanted for are included in droves. From the small things like the fuser having tickboxes for the different sizes of paper (use your SRA3 fuser for that, A3 fuser for the other, A4 and so on) that will help you prevent marks to the large hope of SIQA. It seems you can scan your page with crop marks and it automagically generates alignment profiles. You can also correct inboard/outboard density automatically. This promises a lot, I don't have it installed yet as we are waiting on the engineer from England but we'll see...
To be fair the machine is not perfect, I feel that they f*cked the pooch with the UI. For some reason it was redesigned so that you're usually only using a tiny strip in the middle of the screen... much more scrolling. It's by no means intolerable, but it is certainly a shame. Composite overprint also produces some very unusual results. It's early days yet, I've only had the machine running a couple of days and it's still in the honeymoon period, so we'll see.
What I can say is that this machine is strong out of the gate and very impressive. I am inspired enough by its performance to come on here and post for the first time in a long time.
In my print shop we joke about the "big photocopiers" even though they say Digital Press on the front. This machine really is almost worthy of being called a printing press, it spits out the work at a great quality (ready to be immediately worked with, litho guys) and quite the speed. Now if they can only finagle it so that I can adjust registration on the fly...
