Kitkat

Hi All. We have lot of experience of Xerox, Canon and KonicaMinolta over 20 years. Pound for pound KM have offered the best value for money and quality. So much so that nearly all of our surrounding colleges and some of the Universities are mostly Konica. All after going through the hoops of tendering. We have KM reprographics units, both colour and mono, and an MFD fleet. All are reliable and the service guys are nothing less than excellent. They work directly for Konica and know the machines very well. Build quality is good, and the user interfaces are easy to use and work well with PCounter and Papercut (the two management software systems we are familiar with). I can recommend KM to anyone. Having said this, Canon MFD's are a class act, well made and reliable, however the premium price really makes one think if its worth the extra outlay, for example on our last tender they were 40% more expensive than KM, and their package was around 25% less feature rich. On the last round of procurement, Xerox had lost its way, MFD quality was only average, the sales pitch was lack lustre and unrealistic on pricing, and almost no service engineers in the north, a total non starter. Shame as their production equipment in reprographics had been good quality, and they had priced themselves out of our market. Having said all this, every rose has its thorns. KM is strong on the quality and reliability of it equipment, and its service engineers are second to none and will give excellent service. However account management is a little lack lustre. Occasional mix ups on billing, and confusion on devices supplied through third party suppliers being a little problematic. Having said this, in the cost benefit analysis KM know their education market well, and are the largest supplier to education and certainly in our region. The benefits for us have thus far outweighed the drawbacks. I meet a lot of colleagues that have had experience of Kyocera, often being one of the cheapest on the frameworks. We dont hear much waxing lyrical about the equipment or service, but as long as the machines are offsite after 3 years they do a job. I have seen Toshiba at print trade fairs, and had my hands on the machines several times, build quality seems reasonable, and the feature of being able to erase what has just been printed and reusing the sheets of paper up to five times times is amazing to witness, and fun to play with. At the time there was a lack of service engineers in the north making this too high risk for us. One major benefit for us is that KM sell and support direct to the customer. There are no middle men, no extra mouths to feed and offering delays and excuses why issues are not resolved in a timely fashion, like we do sometimes experience on other contracts, and we deal directly with the manufacturer that resolves issues quickly.

Meraki and the other flagship vendors, are at the leading edge of research and development. On the boards of the IEEE standards body. Their target markets are corporations, large retail, banking and so on. These customers are very concerned that their significant investment is robust, secure, reliable and has a rock solid wealth of technical backup, and is kept right up to date. They have the wealth to support their WiFi needs. Meraki's list of world wide customers is truly colossal, which allows them, like others, to afford a huge research and development division in California. They are GDPR and PCI compliant, and back it up with a wealth of granular reporting. In an an environment which promotes BYOD, the feature set allows a lot of device acceptance with a wealth of control for technicians. We also have Meraki, which we were lucky enough to purchase on a good deal, (like everybody else on the forum, this has always the possibility to change due to funding and emerging competition), and it does a simply brilliant job. If you chose it, it would without any doubt, work well for you for may years to come. Some of our colleagues are also very right in explaining to us that there are a wealth of other solutions which can provide a good quality service from manufacturers that although are not Tier1 vendors, are producing a good and honest product, often (as already described), are indeed based on the same or similar chip sets from the likes of Broadcom and Qualcom etc. inside the AP's. They don't have all the expensive software refinements that the Tier1 vendors have, and fancy offices in expensive central London, Paris and New York etc. However their core functionality will does the job. If money is limited I know Rukus does the job well from what I have seen over the years, and their list of customers that are very happy. I am personally unfamiliar with Unifi. However my manager is familiar with it and explains that it is widely used in schools and is affordable, has less functionality, however represents good value for money, and is reliable as our colleagues on the forum have explained to us. Good luck

Dear IT colleagues. Were a medium sized FE college. We are familiar with Cisco, Meraki(CiscoMeraki) and Aerohive. Cisco is quite expensive, which is now out of our price bracket now, however Meraki has served us superbly well for almost six years. It will meet the needs of most WiFi needs in education, and with the great Meraki dashboard. Its finest attribute is that if you don't have the training and expertise of running wifi networks professionally, and the hours weekly to spend manually configuring it and maintaining it. Meraki and Aerohive are really good at self managing with very few issues, and almost no configuring. Reporting is very easy and maintenance almost none existent, really good for busy technicians. We have around 4000 mobile devices attached daily and around 200 Access Points, and a pile of excellent feedback from customers. We can reccommend. Good luck with your choices.

I forgot to mention the other, and more prominent issue that the Organic LCD panels loose their effectiveness from day 1. Lamps produce terrific heat and emit UV. Both of there factors degrade the RGB LCD panels from the moment we unpackage them and get them up and running. Many manufacturers have moved to DLP chip, with no LCD panels. The life expectancy is massively increased, with a trade off that the colours initially are not great compared to a new Epson or NEC LCD etc. (colours coming from a spinning colour wheel). However the colours and brightness last a long time, and the light sources are often LED/Laser. Both of which emit much reduced heat, and no UV. Epson have moved to inorganic LCD panels which are expected to last longer than Organic LCD panels. We the education customers will have to decide if this has improved things. One drawback of DLP is that on lower end models, some people can see the 'Rainbow Effect'. Not everyone can see it, it all depends on how our brains decide to interpret the tiny flashing images that make up the motion picture. Some peoples brains pick up on it instantly, and some it begins after a while, and once spotted, it persists for some.I cannot see it and i have exceptional eyesight normally. However some of my colleagues can see it and they mention it can cause a very mild sense of nausea. I am sure we can agree, its a tricky set of technologies to decide between.

HID style lamps produce a lot of heat. Ultra fine particles in the atmosphere, like carbon from motors, epidermis, pollen and nano particles, that find their way past the filter. Find their way into the lens assembly, and the heat fuses the particles onto the surface of the glass. Around year three of a five year/six year life cycle it begins to become noticeable. Once beautiful and vivid colours appear to fade to grey. The brightness is visibly diminished and is in slow decline until the end of life of the product. Often changing a rather expensive HID bulb presents very little improvement to the quality of the image. It is a feature of most HID projectors, like a lot of NEC, Epson etc. LED and laser projectors claim that their products maintain their colour and bright image over a much greater period of time. We shall see. On the last round of procurement, we slightly over specified the projectors, (Epson), at 3200 lumen's, and from the outset ran them in Eco mode at 2240 lumen's. This experiment has paid off for us (215 projector fleet). We are half way through year 4 of a 5 year cycle, (replacing next summer). The majority of the projectors are a whole lot brighter and more colourful than we expected at this time. The lens assemblies not being exposed to such an intensity of heat for such a long period of time, has resulted in a cleaner image; and so far, no complaints from the lecturers. However the images are starting to dim visibly, but still very use-able. Grinding the surfaces of the lens assembly sounds like an interesting challenge.

Thanks for the feedback guys, your advice is invaluable. You know as well as we do, that the sales people will say anything to anybody to gain an order with a hint of commission attached. Real experiences from valued colleagues as yourselves, is highly prized information indeed.

Thanks for the insight into the MFP's. I have seen Sharp units at the old Danwood offices in Leeds some years back. Looked like good units. Pre-biometrics though. Every couple of years we consider biometrics, go through the cycle of how we can use and integrate it, copiers, vending, library services, canteen etc. Our senior management are not enthused sadly. Preferring magstipe cards and barcode technology. We live in hope...

Thanks for the feedback to MatthewL and KevinB. I feel encouraged by your advice. We will be going through the procurement process, beginning in a years time. I will make sure Papercut is in the running. We looked at it about five years ago, it looked very good then, unfortunately it was bundled as a deal with a brand of copiers and a sales pitch, and pricing at that moment in time that was not great. I am looking forward to seeing it again. If I may ask, what brand of copiers and or reprographics hardware do you have, and what are your thoughts on your experience with it?

We recommend Konica Minolta hardware for both reprographics and MFD fleets. The service is excellent on rental and very cost effective, compared to both Canon and Xerox which have supplied us previously. Both Canon and Xerox hardware was very good, and the service also good. The rental cost of KonicaMinolta has been so much lower, without a diminishing of service quality, it has been an excellent move to reduce costs. PCounter Administrator that handles credit for customers and ties into AD works quite well. However trying to gain quality reports for management from PCounter Web Reporting, for the last 10 years. Has resulted in us, like so many others, in abandoning it as near worthless. More accurate reports can be found by looking in the bottom of a tea cup and reading the tea leaves. Our frustration with Web Reporting is shared amongst all but one of the other college IT teams, that we know use it in our area. Your money is better spent on software elsewhere. We have been to many print events over the years, and know other schools and colleges experiences. No system we have seen or know of seems to meet the exact requirements of education, and we have wasted much money on products that simply have not delivered. However our interest in Papercut is gaining momentum...

Beware of some of the management solutions. Some of them are for large organisations, often used in global banks, oil industries etc. Which are rebranded for use in schools. The schools and colleges are unaware that when the sales staff explain that it works flawlessly and is easy to pull reports. The converse is true, hours are wasted creating new reports, and further hours spent trying to get it to work. Larger organisations can absorb the cost of this localised development, often as outsourced IT providers absorb the cost. However smaller organisations spend a disproportionate level of time for limited return. We have been down this road.

Thanks for the offer. he is a real nice guy, early twenties and real interested in getting into a school tech role. I will let him know.

Hi. We had a couple of keen lecturers with some hopes and some ideas of what they wanted with a budget. We (ITSS) put together a shopping list and it looked impossible for the budget that was available. We approached many suppliers and some offers seemed reasonable. The academia.co.uk people somehow managed to cram almost everything on the list into the budget, we were very surprised, as the others could not. Most curiously the deal on the cameras was amazing, almost half the price of the next best offer. Maybe they just happend to have a countainer load arrive and it was good luck for us with our timing, I don't know. I was just chatting with our Media Technician about the blog here, and he thought it may be well worth you contacting Academia and giving them a list and asking for a quote on their best price, they have everything to put together a pack for a good price. Its a buyers market, money in education is in short supply and its going to get tighter over the next 3 years and everybody in the sector knows it. I think you may get a very good deal. Good luck with the project, I hope it works out well.

Hi, I work in the FE sector in York. We purchased a full tv suite from Academia.co.uk. Which included green screen frames and fabrics, Panasonic AVCHD-71E cameras and Ianiro lights, Manfroto Tripods and so on. I cannot divulge the prices we paid, but I may suggest that company as a potential supplier as the prices were the best we could find after a protracted search in the marketplace.

Oddly enough, I happen to know a student who has applied for that position at Bootham School, and he was asking if I knew anything about it. The only thing I could tell him is that I expect it would be inundated with applications, as there are few IT jobs around in the city at the moment.