Reprographics copier recommendations

[smurfomatic]

Currently our reprographics room uses a Ricoh Pro C5100S with booklet finisher, punch & large capacity tray. This is up for renewal in 12 months and we're looking into replacements. This has been a particularly unreliable machine - and Ricoh only seem to have a couple of engineers trained to repair it...

 

This machine is used for everything from printing pupil diaries to promotional material, so needs to be fast, reliable and high quality.

 

What we'll need it to do:

 

Double sided colour printing on A3/A4/A5, paper and card

Booklet fold & staple

Hole punch - 2 & 4 holes

Multiple paper trays, including the function for front/back pages from a separate tray

 

"Would be nice" features:

 

Multi fold option

It would be great if we can find a machine that'll fold A5 into A6 booklets, as this is how we print our school calendars for parents. We had been told the Ricoh would do this, then found out it wouldn't, so we have to print them then use a separate unit to fold & staple them.

 

Suggestions, previous experience (good or bad) and other comments welcome!

[pete]

We're using a KM Bizhub C654e as the main reprographics copier and don't have any complaints.

[localzuk]

Interestingly, we have a Pro C5200S, and whilst it is a reliable machine, it is not without its issues also (the main issue we have is it keeps putting a sheen of toner across white 160gsm paper when we print to it, so white becomes slightly blue). We did suffer with a lack of engineers trained on it at first but there seem to be a few down here now that are trained on it (and the Pro 8200S we also have).

 

I have just today emailed to get this escalated, as they aren't cheap machines!

[nadeem]

We had a nice Sharp unit for a while, so can recommend them

 

Handy tip, when you're looking at various models, take along a USB with some of your trickier documents and ask them to print/fold/staple them for you (and in the above example some A5 paper too)

[localzuk]

Handy tip, when you're looking at various models, take along a USB with some of your trickier documents and ask them to print/fold/staple them for you (and in the above example some A5 paper too)

Take some of the paper you use too - everything looks great when its printed on £2.50 per sheet specially coated super paper. Not so good on the cheap bulk we use daily.

[MatthewL]

A sharp will do all of that except the A6 fold, will only do Z fold I think. Not aware of any machine that can fold like that.

[PotNoodleTech]

Got a C5100s here with booklet finisher and LCT and it's been pretty reliable.

 

I've been happy with Ricoh overall.