Riso printers - anybody used them?

[CESIL]

Hi All,

 

As the title says do you have any experience with Riso printers?

 

We are looking at replacing the various printers and old copier with a few new better units and one of my suppliers has just suggested Riso as a good alternative.

 

I had never heard of them but the technology looks interesting as they seem to be using some sort of inkjet.

[jamesreedersmith]

Riso - Drivers can be very problematic and even more so if you have any macs as they need an additional moudule to print from macs and some dont have mavericks drivers at all yet.

[Oaktech]

My Ex works at a print company and they use the bigger Riso machines for small batches. they are very high quality output and very well built machines. If I remember correctly they were a PITA to set up due to odd software, but once up and running very reliable.

[hallb15]

I had them in for a demo last year. Their big selling points are print speed, quality, and low running costs. The big negative for us was the cost of the printer itself. As we needed 4 units around school, it was prohibitively expensive. If we'd only needed one device, we would have gone with RISO all day long.

 

Get the RISO demo van in - its worth seeing them in action and we got free sweets and pens (we all know how much an EduGeek likes freebies!)

[Badzeye]

We have 3 Riso 3050s in our school.

 

They were a pain to set up and take up 2 network points and 5 power sockets each they had trouble with the cheaper paper we used to buy and now have to order in much higher quality paper and seem very sensitive to the paper you use. The quality of the printing is not as good as our older copiers anything with pictures on it looks very poor. They also do not have a paper cut driver ,which is being worked on, so the printing is not being managed at the minute. They are huge and make a lot of noise but they can print out our weekly newsletter in half the time of our old machines.

 

All in all they are pretty good for printing out lots of pages quickly.

[CESIL]

Thanks for the info folks.

 

Looks like they may be a bit over the top for our junior school. Especially if noise is an issue!

 

We are also a bit short on power and network points as this is predominantly an old building so 5 sockets would be a PITA.

 

At present it looks like we will be going with either Sharp or Ricoh.

[rickypike]

We had Riso machines at our place, very cheap and fast, print quality wasn't great and as others have pointed out drivers were an issue (especially in a Citrix environment - ended up having to use a universal HP driver). We have replaced ours with Kyocera MFD's and now use PaperCut - best move we've made for print/copy!

[smidsy]

We are using a RISO ComColor 7050 MFD in a primary school of 340 as our main printer and it has been great so far. This is a big improvement on the previous HC5500 that we had before. Print speed is good and the quality is okay (we use a Xerox for any particularly high print). They have made big improvements on the devices UI as well so I have fewer questions from staff about how to do duplex copies than before. Had no problems with print drivers but only Windows devices print to it at the moment so can't say anything about Mac compatibility.

 

I would recommend getting them in for a demo as they will bring a truck to the school and show you the quality in your car park + some free things.

[Chris_]

At my last school we had a Riso HC5500. It was big, but it was very fast (up to 115ppm) and cheap to run, especially colour. Didn't have any issues with the driver in our Windows environment.

[fredbayker]

The drivers can be troublesome. Especially if you've had a previous RISO model as the older drivers can interfere and cause halt jobs in the print queue.

Manual/scripted removal of the older driver is often required per machine.

Best to avoid if you can.