High volume MFD's. Xerox or Ricoh?

ajf

ajf

ajf

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I have been tasked with looking at some replacements for our aging Canon printer/copier devices.

The two manufacturers we are choosing from is Ricoh and Xerox.
Just wonder if anyone has experience of these two brands from large MFD type machines point of view?

Xerox is (surprisingly) the cheapest option at the moment by quite a margin, but Ricoh seem to have a larger dealer network.

Any comments/feedback appreciated.
 
What are the drivers like for each? 32 and 64 bit whatever OS's you have?

I get a fair amount of involvement with Olivetti MFDs and drivers can be a real PITA. They have some generic drivers as, IIRC, Olivetti and two or three other companies all sell the same machines.
 
Here we have the Xerox Workcentre 7228, 7335 and 7530.

The 7228 and 7335 have been absolutely hassle free, and Xerox's support network has been fine (Based in Central London).

The biggest issue we've had is with the 7530. Xerox changed the way users are input into the Network Scanning facility - it is extremely labour intensive now as there is no way to 'batch input' users or pull them from AD.
On the other two printers, the users are loaded in through a CSV file which is quick and easy to edit.

That reminds me, I do need to contact them about the input method on the new one - maybe they've fixed it since I last investigated ~6 months ago.

Edit: Honourable mention for Canon MFP's, not had any problem with them except the drum units on some of their larger units are not a user-servicable part. Not necessarily a bad thing.
 
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Personally i'd stay stick with canon, we had ricoh 4 years ago before moving to canon and they were dreadful. Using canon MFDs with uniflow now and it's fantastic.
 
Ricoh MFDs are great and had no problems at all with them. Depending on what you need try going direct to them.
 
Thank you for all the feedback.
The top thing with the Xerox was the colour accuracy 'out of the box' for our Publicity department to use.
I think it was the 7535 that was the best.
We only currently need 3 devices - 2 colour and one mono for bery high volume copies - but I want a brand I can stay with when we get more.

I have tried Ricoh direct as one of the options, but purely on cost they are not competitive, and they accept they can't match resellers.

I have worked with Canon MFPs and Uniflow but there is some negativity to Canon in my current company hence looking elsewhere for the replacements.
Uniflow is not something needed anyway. All the copiers I have looked at have the basics such as secure print built in and nothing is audited by user etc.

I will double check drivers as we will need 64bit ones for the 2008 print server and Win7 64bit PCs. They also need to be fully PCL6 compliant for use with some specialist software that prints via raw PCL commands.

Devices will be purchased outright but have a per copy maintenance contract so not too worried about user replaceable parts.
 
We have just replaced all our aging Ricoh C4500 with Xerox 7556.

Not too bad so far, few niggles but hope the training lady on Wednesday will answer some of our issues.

Reasons for getting rid of our Ricoh was due to bad rep across all offices. To be fair they where signed on a silly 5 year contract which for my business and needs was silly as we need to print high quality and large amounts of prints. Some or our offices had Firey attached which where very problematic and actually not really worth the money I found. Also major issues with the account, didn't help our account was originally setup by our old parent company.

Hardware wise they are not too bad but found support patchy round the country. I'm near Oxford and our guy was great. Only had one issue one Christmas where I had to persuade them to replace the complete phaser unit rather than just the parts for the last 3 weeks after they failed. Our Brighton and Manchester offices had the worst support. Manchester had to had a new machine in the end and Brighton took well over SLA to fix.

From a IT point of view the Riooh drivers are shocking. The support for them have been really bad with them really stop developing them 2 years ago for our devices. The Friey support was the worst with features missing which caused complaints and issues with staff.

Thank god they have all gone now, hopefully the Xerox will be much better. At least we are on a shorter contract so if we find they are problematic we can get rid of sooner.
 
Hmm, a couple of interesting comments there. I will certainly consider them when making the suggestions to those with the money!

Xerox was certainly my initial choice but then I just became a little unsure for some reason.
Just checked, the models we are looking at is 5745 for high volume mono (500k+ per year) and a 7535 and 7120 for colour. The 7535 is apaprently an MFP version of the 7500 printers which is the model that was very impressice colour wise.

Konica was looked at but seemed 'too' cheap and both myself and a colleague have in the past found them to be less than the best around. The standard colour output was also pretty poor too.
 
I think what you'll find is most places after 3-5 years of an MFD hate them and switch to somebody else and come back in that time frame again and you'll get the same answer about the current provider...
 
We have about 50 Ricoh MFD's across 4 sites. We've had them about 30 months now and on the whole they've been good. We have had issues with accounting codes and not being able to send these from Unix boxes which has meant we've had to turn accounting off on a couple of them which is not ideal for us but it's not a showstopper, and I suspect we'd have similar issues with other makes.

We buy from Ricoh direct and their support is really good. They don't seem to worry about swapping expensive parts out like some dealers would. The @remote service is great - it books service calls and orders consumables automatically. My favourite is the MPC5000, we've got a monster of a 6501SP too but that's had a couple of visits recently for faults but its done well over a million pages now.

Physically the Ricoh's seem to be well built. We had Konica Minolta BizHub's before these and they were poorly designed and built by comparison - forever jamming because the paper tray parts had bent or little parts had worn out inside.

Do not buy anything with a Fiery controller unless you have a full time member of staff to stand by the machine and look after it. We had a BizHub C450 with a Fiery and it was the most troublesome piece of junk I've ever had the displeasure of looking after. It would randomly crash mid-job, drop jobs it didn't like, calibrate itself every 5 minutes and it took 5 minutes to reboot - which it needed nearly every day.


If you're buying from a dealer the service you get will be largely determined by them, so check them out and get references. Also do some research into the specific models you're buying - every manufacturer has a couple of iffy machines with design faults in their range it seems which are best avoided. Copytechnet is a good source of info from guys who are fixing them out in the field.
 
Moved from Canon Imagerunner series laser copiers to Xerox Colorqube, much much cheaper and way more reliable, doing about 400,000 per year on each.
 
Terrier_Jimlad said:
Konica Minolta MFDs not an option? We put 95 of them in across our entire infrastructure, not many complaints to be fair!
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sorry to drag this back up.

Just gone back to have a look at Konica machines - it was actually Kyocera we discarded.

What sort of feedback have you had about quality in terms of colour accuracy etc?
I've been told they are seen as 'the' machines for graphic design and other colour sensitive applications?

Whilst not our foremost criteria at least one device will be heavily used by our Publicity Dept so it is relevant.
 
ajf said:
What sort of feedback have you had about quality in terms of colour accuracy etc?
I've been told they are seen as 'the' machines for graphic design and other colour sensitive applications?
Click to expand...
We go along to different resellers and take a look at copiers at least once a year (assuming there are new models out). Xerox have been the best in terms of colour photocopier reproduction up to about £10,000 for the past few years. The Xeroxs do have an issue when the fusers start to go, all of the prints start to look a bit purple - the temperature not being right I suppose?
We were at Olivetti most recently and weren't too impressed by their colour repro performance, but their new service guarentees (max duty cycles etc.) make them worthwhile for cheap, bulk text printing.

Resellers are usually happy to sort you out with a demo, so it's worth just having a chat about requirements etc. and seeing the output for yourself.
 
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ajf said:
sorry to drag this back up.

Just gone back to have a look at Konica machines - it was actually Kyocera we discarded.

What sort of feedback have you had about quality in terms of colour accuracy etc?
I've been told they are seen as 'the' machines for graphic design and other colour sensitive applications?

Whilst not our foremost criteria at least one device will be heavily used by our Publicity Dept so it is relevant.
Click to expand...

We have a colorqube 9203PS and after 2.4million pages, its still a very reliable machine. Sure its had replacement parts like a drawer and a couple of new transfer belts, but it you keep feeding it wax crayons (its a dye sublimation printer) and empty the waste tray every so often, it gives no trouble at all. Xerox come out same day usually and if the engineer doesn't have the part, he is either back later that day or has the part couriered overnight from Holland.

Also have a 7425 which is slow but not unreliable and a 5745 which is great too.
 
ajf said:
sorry to drag this back up.

Just gone back to have a look at Konica machines - it was actually Kyocera we discarded.

What sort of feedback have you had about quality in terms of colour accuracy etc?
I've been told they are seen as 'the' machines for graphic design and other colour sensitive applications?

Whilst not our foremost criteria at least one device will be heavily used by our Publicity Dept so it is relevant.
Click to expand...

Our in-house printing guys used both Konica Minoltas and the virtually identical Olivettis without any issues. The newer machines are all Olivetti as the local dealer provide better support.

We've also got them out in general office use. As mentioned before - watch the drivers, 64-bit is a pain the bum!
 
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