Kyocera, Sharp or Ricoh?

[ndcollegeits]

We are going through a process of reducing our printer fleet from 100+ to around 20 by introducing MFDs. We have proposals from three different providers offering Ricoh, Sharp or Kyocera products and Papercut MF as the management solution (we currently use Papercut NG). Just wondering what experience people have of these three makes in terms of reliability and ease of use? It's a five year contact so I don't want to make the wrong decision!

 

Thank

 

Andy

[aguacate]

Andy,

 

Sharp and Kyocera are budget machines, hence why they are cheaper, in my experience they work well up to the 3 year mark at which point they become unreliable, there are government frameworks that stipulate that after a 3 year agreement it reverts to a 30 day notice period, at which point you can run the machines until they become unreliable, personally for a 5 year term I would chose Ricoh.

[Achandler]

My advice is go to speak to local colleges/ schools as well and see the actual machines for yourself. I know little about actual photocopiers to be be fair but I did this process recently with our Reprographics person.

 

We opted for Kyocera, actually rebadges as Develop, (Canon was our 2nd choice), but we looked at Ricoh and Sharp as well.

 

The Ricoh, everyone seemed to say were great for 4 years but in year they were needing engineers called out constantly, we saw both newer and older computer. They were also plastic inside (as oppose to metal).

The Sharp, we couldn't find anyone who had had them a long time, but again our Repro person didn't like how plastic they were, basically more plastic is more breakage apparently, through either staff getting annoyed or worse for wear and tear.

 

The big Kyocera we have, the screen is rather daunting with all the options, the Papaercut Follow Me is also a little flaky on it, the smaller machines where it seemed more fully embedded we had no issues. Go for card readers and stickers no matter which option you choose.

[RLR]

We did a similar thing 2 years ago. We now have a managed solution where we pay per print. We got Ricoh for our MFDs, and some small black and white printers which are Cannon. We rarely have issues and when we do, we log a call and an engineer usually comes out within a day. This is provided by Home | Systems Technology

[unixman_again]

Avoid the Ricoh Pro c5100s Colour - we've had nothing but trouble with ours. It almost has it's own engineer. If you want to print landscape card, well you can't. Lots of paper jams too and it used loads of waste toner bottles.

 

The Sharp MX2614 Colour and Sharp MX6240 Colour are brill - easy to look after. Almost never goes wrong.

 

In reprographics we have Sharp MXM1204's and the lady who runs them says they are better than the HPs we had before, although the HPs were getting end of life.

[localzuk]

Avoid the Ricoh Pro c5100s Colour - we've had nothing but trouble with ours. It almost has it's own engineer. If you want to print landscape card, well you can't. Lots of paper jams too and it used loads of waste toner bottles.

The c5100s has been replaced by the c5200s now. Apparently improved engine and paper handling.

[Danp]

We are mostly Kyocera, have been for years. Now we are mostly a Laser Life supplied organisation, we stuck with Kyocera devices.

[Chuckster]

The school's BM made the erroneous mistake of swapping out the 4 Ricoh copiers we had for Sharp purely on a cost measure exercise (he had only just started the job when he made the decision). We've had the Sharp copiers almost 2 years and, although we've not had any faults with them, they are horrendously slow and the UI isn't intuitive enough. It now takes several more clicks/taps to get anything done and the warm up time on copiers is very ridiculous.

 

We have had complaints about it with no end in sight about these copiers from staff, but there isn't much we can do as we're tied in to a 3 year contract.

 

If you want the best stick with Ricoh - and don't accept anything less.

[Techie2000]

We always use Konica Minolta - they have just refreshed their education pricing structure. The new pricing is extremely competitive (much cheaper on the machine rentals and cost per copy) - plus reliable, solid machines.

[Duranis]

Not one of the three options but I'm switching all our printers and copiers to Konica Minolta ones. The ones we already have have been pretty faultless. The colour lasers I'm replacing at the moment have been running for at least 5 years with very little maintenance or problems. There engineer support when I have needed it was fast and competent.

[MatthewL]

Sharp is one of the most user friendly machines going, now depending on what machine you get, some of the older ones do not have the newer interface on they are clunky. Sharp and PaperCut MF integrate very well and was the first to get the integrated scanning, Kyocera and Toshiba is v 17 of PaperCut will have it.

 

You can do a lot of the box with Sharp that you cannot with any others and they are all customisable to you needs including function buttons can be programmed for booklet making so all you do is press the button and put your qty in.

 

As long as the machines are looked after, decent paper put through them they will easily last 5 years but you do have to realise all copiers have an average volume they are capable of say a month and lots of people exceed that and except there not to be issues.

[Sagima]

We're all ricoh here. The only problem we had was massively underspeccing the first couple of reprographics printers but that's resolved now I believe (we weren't expecting to be printing up to a million sheets of paper on them each each year)

[localzuk]

We're all ricoh here. The only problem we had was massively underspeccing the first couple of reprographics printers but that's resolved now I believe (we weren't expecting to be printing up to a million sheets of paper on them each each year)

Indeed. Underspeccing caught us out a while back. Our print volumes went from 1.2m over 3 years to 5m over 3 years. Its impossible to spec a machine when that sort of thing happens.

 

Now, we are playing hardball and speccing production level machines. There ain't no way they'll overwork those!

[ndcollegeits]

Just had a meeting about it this morning. In terms of contract cost, the Kyocera's look like the best deal and more than meet the spec of our current volumes. Thy also offer a much higher page per minute than the Sharp and Ricoh devices quoted. If I could ask another question, does anyone have any experience or advice on any of the potential suppliers? They are Sapphire Print Solutions, Clarity Pennine and Alto Digital.

 

Again, any insight gratefully recieved!

 

Andy

[localzuk]

Can't advise on those suppliers but I will ask - have you contacted Ricoh direct? They come in between 20-80% cheaper than resellers I've found.

[ndcollegeits]

I hadn't considered that but will look into it. Is it not necessary to have support from a local reseller or do they offer this centrally with a sub-contractor?

[localzuk]

I hadn't considered that but will look into it. Is it not necessary to have support from a local reseller or do they offer this centrally with a sub-contractor?

All done centrally - no sub-contractor either. Ricoh run their own engineer team.

[mikkydoos]

Can't fault our Sharps. Great machines and very reliable. Work very well with PaperCut.

[GuyJD]

We've got 3 Sharp MFP's here on a 3 year deal currently just into year 2, the one that gets the most heavy use is ridiculously unreliable at this point, I have to call out an engineer at least 2-3 times a month.

 

Another thing to note with the Sharp MFP's is that the toners aren't accepted for recycling by anyone I've found other than the one Sharp recommends and they charge £30 per collection.

[PotNoodleTech]

Ricoh and Papercut MF here and I wouldn't change it as it works great. Got 9 x 3504 out in the field for staff and pupils, 1 x 5502 for data room, 1 Pro C5200S and 1 x Pro 1107 in the print room . No need to buy from a reseller when you can buy straight from Ricoh and get support straight from Ricoh. Did it on a 3 year deal as to be honest 5 years ones are not flexible enough, things change often and you don't want to be waiting years to be able to react to the changes.

 

Papercut is fantastic too. Papercut on Ricoh embedded has been very reliable. Looking forward to V17 as it bring a few improvements on the Ricoh machines regarding scanning and the interface.

 

I did get several quotes for other companies but make sure you go through the fine print because Pages per minute is not the only consideration - some other copiers had much lower page count per year ratings and required major servicing much more often.

 

Another thing to ensure is on Pro machines (anything faster than ~40-50ppm) you need to use decent paper, if you use cheapest of the cheap you'll end up with constant jams. We tried it and were having several jams per day - went back to the decent paper we were using before and now get about 0 jams per day on average. The cheap paper however seems to be fine on out our 3504. Basically once you hit 50ppm or higher the machine really needs to ram the paper in hard and fast and cheap paper bends, flexes, folds over, causing jams.

 

Cant think of anything else to say really! Hope it helps!

[nadeem]

We've used both Ricoh and Sharp - currently with Sharp direct - no reseller involved, support is brilliant, machines have been fantastic, per page print rate is good - PM for contact details

[robyholmes]

Another Sharp user here with Papercut MF. Works well together. We put penalties in the contact for call out times and downtime rates. This is something we learned from the last contract.