New Copiers

[Badzeye]

Hey all,

 

going through looking at new copier contracts at the moment and I could do with some insight. We have come down to 3 quotes within about 1000 pounds per year of each other. One for RISO machines one for Sharp machines and the last for Kyocera machines.

 

Now we have had Kyocera machines before and maybe we got a bad batch but they havent done very well for us. The other two brands I have no experiance of so was wondering if you could pass on yours. I know the RISO machines lease is more expensive but we are still saving on our current provider.

 

Any thoughts or experiances?

 

thank you

[LeMarchand]

Are the RISO machines the ones that make a template and then basically "silk screen" the prints? IIRC they're cheaper for multiple copies, but less so on one-offs. Had one at a place I used to work and the staff never got the hang of it.

 

If it's a standard printer or Sharp, I've not had experience of those.

[TechMonkey]

We have Sharp machines. We had a single RISO, but it was a previous generation model so it may be unfair me commenting on it.

Sharp have been fine for us. We renewed the contract last time with them. We are starting to run into issues as the machines are old, but they are now coming up for 7 years old and we have a contract renewal impeding so we will refresh everything. Biggest issue we have is with paper quality and damp, but we are in an old building so it may be environmental rather than a Sharp issue. They were much cheaper by far for us so it was a no-brainer. Toners are auto ordered, a few consumables we have to manually order. Engineers are good and we have sometimes had same day response. The one difference in the tenders we got was a lot of suppliers were offering 4hr response, which Sharp didn't offer. But we have enough copiers that speedy response isn't a major issue, especially with the cost saving. We have integrated with Papercut and that all just works.

 

RISO we got rid of in the end. The signing on system was clunky, having to have an external box that had interesting foibles like not being able to type some characters for passwords. I think this functionality is built in now. I can't remember all the issues but I seem to remember that the cost per print was much higher on black, I think. Staff loved the speed, but that was only available on black. Quality was alright, fine for exam papers and internal docs but not so great for sending things out. We did event programs on them a few times and they were ok.

[Jayellcee]

We have sharps and have had for several years. I would recommend them. Not many issues and if we do have one, the engineers are swift and expert at solving.

[Badzeye]

Full on MFDs for RISO now by the looks of it. I have some vague experiance of an older machine of theres that worked like you described but they do proper printers now. Very quick as well.

[mavhc]

Kyocera drivers seem terrible, are Sharp better?

[MatthewL]

Sharp all day long for me, user interface is much more better than the Kyocera although both integrate well with PaperCut if using that. I've got 40+ Sharp's sat around my offices at the moment, worth spending the extra if they are not the cheapest in my view.

[TechMonkey]

Depends on what you mean by terrible. Never had any issues with them. They also seem to work with the generic Papercut driver. The biggest issue we had was that due to having a central queue you had to have the most feature rich driver installed so all features were available. This confused some staff as they enabled some options that the copier they printed to didn't have so it ignored them. They thought this was unreasonable until I explained in very short words how a copier can't do something it doesn't have the capability of doing.

[mavhc]

Barely works with the modern printing api that edge/chrome/metro apps use