RISO printers - good or bad?

[Ertech]

Hi

 

I am looking to replace our old photocopier and come across RISO - anyone have any experience with print quality and service with RISO?

 

Thanks

[smurfomatic]

We've had three Comcolor 7150s for five years (contract up for renewal). They've been great, very few issues, print quality is not as good as a laser but they're a lot cheaper, quicker and more energy efficient.

 

One has of ours has done about 1.5 million pages in that time, and (other than general service, worn rollers etc) has probably had at most a dozen service calls.

 

Service is normally next day call-out for engineers, though if you call first thing sometimes it'll be same day.

[IrritableTech]

Is it ink? Our old RISO reprographics machine used ink and on cheap paper it was a really poor end product. It was cheap to run and we ran it into the ground. The engineer had his own mug in the staff room by the end.

[Ertech]

Should be inkjet - not sure how the photos will look...

[smurfomatic]

It's certainly not a top quality product, we have colour lasers that are used for photos etc. Our RISOs are used by teaching staff for worksheets and such like where quality is not an issue.

[Linfit]

We have six Comcolor FW5230 machines around the school and we use them for everything that does not need to be decent quality.

They are ink jet tech and they get hammered, but generally very robust, and they are fast.

Some engineer call-outs but no more than any other type and they are usually here same day or first thing the next morning.

Cost per page is cheaper than conventional but you have to accept that you need another solution for high quality stuff.

Our staff have no complaints about that, they know to use repro dept for the good stuff but that they can quickly print 30 copies of something in next to no time on the RISO's.

[TechMonkey]

As others have said, as long as expectations are set they are good machines for quick, bulk, non marketing quality, copies. I seem to recall that black was slightly more expensive than other copiers but the speed was a good compensation for that.

 

We had one for a while and lots of staff were sad to see it go but it was a hardcore (that got the purpose) of users. The only issue we had was the card reader, to tie into Papercut, was an external print station and horrific. Didn't even do full symbols so some passwords wouldn't work and read the cards differently to our other copiers. The process to retrieve work was overly complicated and the menu on the system wasn't the greatest. I am told newer machines are much better and have the card reader built in.

[Oaktech]

I've not had a recent one, but the one we had about 7 years ago was really fast and efficient but not great quality and a bit fragile - internals kept breaking and we snapped the multipurpose tray clean off it more than once.

[maark]

get sample printouts - quality is awful compared to laser. Our staff would not have accepted it, yours may but I would check with SMT :-)

[Ratcliffepg]

Poor quality, drivers not the best....

[Chaniel]

We have a RISO GD7330 which replaced a RISO ComColor 7150 and it's been pretty good and the school are happy with it.

 

It's an inkjet so quality is worse than a laser, but it's really not that bad and it prints FAST. For the majority of school printing, you don't need the quality to be impeccable as they're mostly going to be used internally and then get recycled... The RISO is inexpensive, service is good (4hrs) and it's easy to administer for us. Colour comes in at around £0.01p a print and Mono at £0.003p

 

We have the RISO as our main bulk reprographics printer and then have laser printers distributed around the site for day-to-day or higher quality printing requirements.