Anyone running an ikon branded Konica Minolta CPP 500?

What are the good and bad points compared to canon or xerox machines?

Print quality strengths and weaknesses?

We have all three Ikon-branded boxes at our shops.

It's an okay machine. Not a great one.

First problem is that the KM box is touchy. PM's need to be performed more often than Ikon likes to do them. Parts wear out faster than Ikon wants to replace them. No one at Ikon in our region seems to be well-trained on this machine, particularly with the CREO RIP that we use. Trust me, the CREO RIP is the only thing making this machine produce sellable prints.

Learn to clean the corona wires yourself. Calibrate every morning if you are in the print-for-pay business. Colors will be different overnight if you turn the machine off at the end of the day. Heat, humidity and PMS cause the colors to shift.

Get used to having to make adjustments for side A to side B. Do not rely on the duplexer to do this precisely.

Get used to some paper stocks not running. Nothing heavier than 12 point kromekote and you certainly cannot duplex cover stock.

Oh, and don't try to run stock cut down from parent sheets as short grain. It WILL JAM.

Thinking of getting the high-capacity drawer? Good luck! The first one on our machine had a humidity controller that drove us nuts! It stopped every couple of hundred sheets for 10 minutes at a time! The side guides were warped and didn't travel on the bottom rails evenly, making the sheets buckle as the elevator lifted toward the top of the drawer. The second HCD (or tray 4) is doing the same thing, although to a lesser degree.

We have a service contract with Ikon for our four print shops in this area, with multiple machines. If I could go with another service vendor, I sure would.

Thank you so much for sharing your experience to help me out.

Do you find the 650 or 550 noticeably better than the 500?

And how many prints on average do you get between service calls?

I had hoped the fact that Ikon chose to co-brand this konika minolta machine meant they found it very economical to service since that's their business (unlike the manufacturer who makes more money the more durables the machine goes through) The sub 10-cent click charge offered on these konika minolta cpps grabs my attention in this tight economy.

Thanks again so much for your time.

Rick --

We have three 500s and one 650. The 650 produces a much prettier print.
Prints from the 650 look more like they are printed on press than the 500.

We get between 50,000 and 70,000 clicks between PMs. PMs usually include drums, coronas, developers and basic vacuum cleaning.

I think you'll be happier with the 650 as opposed to the 500.

You just have to stay on top of the needed service for it. In other words, watch your jobs when they are running. Streaks and overtoning can show up at any time, and they require a service call.

We have some employees who will queue up a job, enter a quantity and walk away from it. Then they are surprised when the job has gone bad and try to blame the machine or the technician. There's a lot less waste if you get up and check the run every hundred sheets or so. If you see a problem has come up, immediately put in that service call.

We do use the 650 for print-for-pay production. On average, we run around 100,000-120,000 prints per month. We run heavy stock, and we run two sided, heavy coverage sheets. We've been doggin' it out for over a year now and it does make us money.

But it's not a press, and not as tough or sturdy. There are sensitive electronics and environmental factors that can affect the quality of the prints it makes. Keep an eye on it!

We run both a Konica 6500 and the IKON 650, same machines. I can't stress enough what crooks the IKON people have been. Our IKON machine was delivered in December and configured to click 1 time period, regardless of size, same as our Konica. Sometime in April their service department changed it to double click on 12x18's, unlike our Konica. They never told us they were doing this and have given no reason. Our agreement clearly states 1 click per image. Therefore a 12x18 image or an 8.5x11 image were charged one click until this change came into play. I was just billed for 360,000 clicks instead of the 180,000 I was expecting and budgeting. I am witholding payment and can't wait to meet them in court over this. Has anyone else had such a dispute?

We have nothing but problems with Ikon billing, and this has been going on for years. My boss pays the amount he agreed to --- he withholds excess charges. They are only being paid the signed contract amount. Be careful though ---- if you don't talk to them regularly and keep up a dialogue with the people in charge, they may cut you off from service.

What we do with click charges is run jobs 2-up or 4-up; since we are charged 1 click for 11 x 17 or for 8.5 x 11, we step and repeat jobs (where possible) and hijack Ikon for all we're worth!

We have an Ikon branded (CPP500), Konica Minolta C500 in our print for pay business and it is a complete pile of junk! We have had continuous problems to the point that we are now buying a new Xerox 260 despite that we don't really have the sales numbers to justify it yet. We just can't go on with the intermittant functioning and lousy print quality of the C500. The techs tell us that changing paper sizes is the cause of the fuser lines on our 12x18's or 13x19's but what the hell do they want us to do? I mean we ARE a print shop and not everyone wants the same size prints! I was considering moving up to the 6500 but I saw some examples of the printing at a show recently and when I held it up to the light just right guess what I saw? That's right, fuser lines running down the sides of the sheets! And on the show examples even! Then when I looked at another colorful piece, it showed the telltale mottling effect that I am so use to seeing in my large fields of color. We have techs in our shop nearly every day and it doesn't look good at all to my customers. I would think long and hard before buying a Konica product..check Xerox out in a side-by-side test of the same print. Yeah, they cost a bit more but they print something that you can hand to your customer with confidence and not that gut-wretching feeling as you wait for them to notice the lines and the crappy fields of color. The way I became turned on to Xerox was because of all the downtime my C500 gave me, I was forced to outsource to my nearby competitor and he has a little 242 but man does it print pretty pictures! Sorry for the rambling but I've been thru hell with this machine and if my experience can help someone else avoid a mistake, I'll ramble a little! Good Luck

We have three CPP500 machines. One in an office environment and two in a mfg. setting. All three machines break down on a regular basis.

I work in the office environment and am the one responsible for requesting service for the machine. Since it rarely works for more than a week at a time (if that!) we've dubbed the machine "The Lemon".

The Lemon was "repaired" this morning and four hours later it broke down. The tech said he'll be out to fix it tomorrow. The machine, aside from the four hours it worked today, has been down since Friday (five days?!). The track record of this machine is so dismal that I highly encourage you to NEVER EVER purchase or lease one.

We have had The Lemon for 14 months and I can't even begin to tell you how many service requests have been placed for it. We've only made 205,986 copies/print jobs since we've had it.

Also, the quality is very poor. For months the coloring from left to right was drastically different, very inconsistent. This has more or less been remedied, but it took them months to figure it out.

The mother board was fired and recently replaced, along with numerous other parts. I think the drum unit has been replaced at least twice, maybe three times. Rollers for the more commonly used trays have been replaced multiple times.

Our three machines break down so frequently that they are now stock piling parts in my office to have on hand. Usually they have to order most of the parts and that can take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours. The time it takes for them to receive the parts and actually service the machine can take days.

Just today the machine jammed to the point where three employees (myself included) gave up. We cleared over 15 jams total and were able to only print about 23 of the 75 pages needed. Hopefully tomorrow I can finish my print job.

The Lemon is very unreliable, take your chances if you like, but I wouldn't wish this machine on the Taliban.

I'm so frustrated with this machine and again strongly discourage anyone from leasing or purchasing one.

We lease our machine from IKON and have a service contract with IKON. While I like both techs that service this machine (they're very pleasant, polite, helpful) I am NOT pleased with the IKON's management team. They are NOT helpful and have yet to resolve any of issues, aside from sending out a tech to service the machine. Our contract states that a tech is to service the machine within four hours of the service request. Some days they respond within the four hours, however, usually it's the next business day.

Stay away from the CPP500 unless you like your patience tested, enjoy paying for something that doesn't work, and find it fun to wait around for parts and service.

My company has a three year lease on Ikon's CPP 650 - which is two years too many, as this machine is constantly being serviced. The first year we did not experience very many problems, but since then we have had a service tech come out to service the printer nearly every week.

We print on 20 lb copier paper as well as 100 lb glossy stock. Typically it is the copier paper that jams - and by jams I mean either the paper really does jam or it just doesn't pass through for some reason.

The tech's are always finding screws that have come loose and say most of our jams are because the printer is dirty - well then clean it! Luckily we have a contract with Ikon for supplies and service, but when the printer is down for a day or two, production is decreased and we're playing catch-up. On the flip side when the machine does work, the color quality is great.

In the end I would absolutely not recommend the CPP 650 to anyone who needs a dependable printer.

Has anyone here ever heard of somebody being successful at breaking a lease with IKON ??? I am paying almost $1400 per month for my CPP500 that is sitting right now UNPLUGGED and completely worthless to me. I've got about 12 more months of this. And, we picked up our Xerox 260, out of necessity since we couldn't print anything with our piece of crap Ikon supported machine. Now though, we have so much better click rates on the Xerox that if we were to print something on the CPP500, we would be LOSING even more money !