Xerox Docucolor 242 one-month review

I've now had my new xerox docucolor 242 since mid-December and have put 41,500 prints on the meter so far and love the print quality. Glossy prints look great on kromekote -- really nice. Black and white is extremely good to my eye, and color a good upgrade, sharper, deeper blacks, and more consistent than our canons which sometimes show jitter in solid blues and light to medium grays.

Registration is not great on duplexing, but I still haven't put time yet into trying to tame it. I seem to get some skew on the second side so 3 registration points line up fairly ok (not great) but the 4th is off. I have not had a tech come to help me with this yet as I'm not used to duplexing much with our existing canons finding it faster and more consistent to work and turn on those over the past 5 years.

Printing work and turn on the new 242 I find registration better than from our canons. I spent about 30 minutes dialing it in for each paper weight and drawer on the xerox and now I'm happy. I'm not sure yet whether I'll have to keep adjusting as feed rollers wear and such, we'll see. I'm also not sure if I should inquire about a fine skew adjustment knob option I see mentioned in the tech reference -- will inquire the first time I have a tech come out to my site.

Overall the main machine is excellent (12 out of 10 stars), the OHCF a very nice option to have (10 out of 10 stars), the RIP quick but a little glitchy (8 out of 10 stars), and the advanced finisher so-so but plenty workable (4 out of 10 stars).

Print Quality
Print quality meets or exceeds my expectations in all areas on all paper types (though all the drums are only at 50% so far, so I'll reserve final judgement until we reach the end of the first round of durables, but so far quality is simply excellent.)

Color is consistent through a run.

Registration is as good as our canons ever were (have not taken any time to try and dial in duplex registration yet, but one sided is just fine from the OHCF)

Black and white photo print quality is much richer and more tonal than I expected which was always a real limitation with our canons.

And color print quality is really sharp, better than our canons for skin tones, and definitely has more punch.

DocFeeder
The document feeder / scanner is great. Unlike the canons which were always glitchy and annoying and thus dust collectors only, it actually works and works well. Have not made use of it yet, but it's nice to have excellent tools. One thing that would be slightly nicer would be if it would feed a stack of customer-supplied 4x6 photos through the document feeder, but these will probably soon vanish with everyone being digital for a few years now.

OHCF
The bypass tray is actually much better than I had expected coming from canon, so in a pinch I could have made due with that if I had to (if I wanted to put the mone towards a second 242 for example).

But I'm glad I got the OHCF which is a solid piece of equipment and works great. It's quite convenient to be able to load 2,000 sheets and let it run, so no regrets at all there and would buy again without hesitation.

Also the xerox oversize high capacity feeder has worked great feeding kromekote from 8pt to 12 pt so far.

Advanced Finisher
The advanced finisher looks nice and adds a lot to the appearance of the unit, but the functionallity is so-so at best. The cheaper canon M1 finishers that we have look like Rube Goldberg contraptions in that their tray moves up and down with each and every sheet lifting the weight of the entire stack over and over -- I'm quite amazed that the one with 1,050,000 prints on it is still working fine after 5 years. The xerox looks much more logical, but on 20# bond doesn't work very well at all in that the paper drops an inch or so onto the stacker tray with each sheet and that's just enough for it to be able to "fly" slightly crooked so despite the "foot" jogging action we end up with a stack that isn't very even at all and needs to be hand jogged to go through either the docucolor again for the second side or the collator if alreaedy duplexed. It works better on 28/70# and 32/80# color copy paper, but then on 8 pt gloss kromecote (and any coated2 or coated3 thickness) it will only deliver to the top 500 sheet tray not the stacker tray. The finisher does allow us to stack up the full run of uncoated but jogging it separately is a bit of a pain. No big deal though, but not sure I would buy another advanced finisher or just go with the catch tray. It would be nice if a real stacker or finisher with a better jogger foot design were available for the 24x/25x/26x series.

X3eTY Fiery RIP
The bustled RIP is nice and fast for me and has nice driver options. However we have encountered a few glitches with it from CorelDraw which our canon Feiry RIPS don't have. First as shipped, we got a weird "random" star shape (white, black, or gray) covering large areas of the page (30%) randomly when printing from CorelDraw X3 or CorelDraw X4 either printing over or knocking out large areas of the page. Very odd. We applied the 2-part patch on the xerox.com downloads & patches page which solved this "random star" problem, but created a new problem in that after applying the patch now 11x17 pages set to print landscape were rotated 90 degrees on the page and cut-off no matter what the landscape/portrait orientation was set when sending the print.

The workaround for this was to use the xerox supplied pagemaker PPD file, but now we have to set the options all from the one-page dropdown and don't get the benefit of the nice Fiery GUI on the print driver, and also don't have the easy image shift option in the Fiery GUI driver. (but adjusting the image position through the 7-click process tray adjustment on the docucolor itself works ok) I guess the new driver/rip problem is due to an improper bounding box error in the PS output from CorelDraw that is causing the xerox fiery RIP to glitch, but the same print to our two canon fiery rips prints fine. Still, with the Patch + PPD workaround despite losing the driver GUI we are able to print great now, so I'm happy (but hopefully there will be another rip patch/driver update that solves it fully so we can use the GUI and not have the rotation problem from CorelDraw X4 which we use heavily)

Overall
I'm very impressed with the 242 and would recommend this setup to anyone (unless they had the budget to look at a higher-end rip that might be smoother in terms of driver finesse out of the gate, or a stacker which is only an option on the much more expensive machines like the 700)

At the end of the day, even with a couple small annoyances with the RIP and finisher, we're still running faster and what really counts is print quality and that is excellent so far.

 

The duplexing registration has always been a problem on our 250 and 240 machines. It appears to be caused by the tail of the paper being distorted by the heat on the first pass and then using that tail as the lay edge on the second pass. Different stocks are more or less prone to this effect. To test this print a sheet one sided and very carefully measure it you will find that the paper is no longer square, our worst result was a difference of nearly 2mm from side to side!. Choose your stocks carefully and be careful about fuser settings to minimise the problem.

 

Yup, not quite this bad, but we get skew on our brand new machine on everything duplexed so I run everything one sided and turn unless it's very short run (most of what we print is in a run of 1000 or slightly more so it's not a big issue.) When we need our first tech visit I intend to ask about the fine skew adjustment knob option to see if that will help at all.

 

I had a technician come out today. Most Skew, Image Size, & Duplex Tolerances are from 1.4 mm - 2mm. (worse than the impression I received from my sales rep)

If you multiply those by 2 then you get your overall tolerance when printing 2 sided. I suggest using image shift to fix the problem Please be advised that SEF Layouts your x and y values could be switched depending on your PDF Layout. For Example if you have a 18 x 12 PDF your x value is y and your y value is x because the SEF converts youf file to a 12 x 18. I can get mine "dead nuts" on 1 value and within .5 mm on the other value.

Good luck guys!

 

I can dial in the x and y adjustments ok on the machine; the only problem I have is that on kromekote for example I get a 0.3 degree skew over the 18" so it would be handy if there were some skew adjustment for this on the docucolor.

 

Hmm, the rep did not mention any skew adjustments. Are you running Kromekote through the bypass?

If you are running it through the bypass I suggest making some type on contraption to put in the space between the paper guides and edge of bypass. I use 1 8.5 x 11 100# cover, fold it over to 5.5 x 8.5 and then bend it (do not put another crease in the fold as it will not retain its rebound/rigidity property) and stick one on each side to make sure the guides are tight but not too tight. This should ameliorate some degree of skew. You should not be getting skew innaccuracies close to xerox tolerances with Cover Stock.

If you have any questions as to the description of said "contraption" I can fire off a couple pictures(via email) of the way I have mine set up. It should help some, but nothing is a perfect world with the 2xx docucolor.

 

Thanks for posting this detailed report -- we're looking at a 242 (and an imagePress c1) and found this very helpful.

 

I'm not sure if you are comparing apples to apples(maybe only in price)... In my opinion the 242 is a hybrid between a light duty production machine and an office copier machine. I think the c1 was intended for strictly production work

You might want to look at a xerox 700(same engine, faster speed, can duplex coated stocks)

 

Call a rep and have them check the spec range on sef 18'' skew. I think it was only 1.4 MM, but if you're duplexing it you might be getting 2.8-3.0 and be within xerox spec range.

 

Due to such a slow color speed, I'm not sure I'd categorize the C1 as a real production machine either... they're both hybrids of a sort in my opinion.

I'll know better once I put another few hundred thousand prints on my 242, but at 80,000 I have no regrets and going for the 242 was the best decision I made this year - love it so far!

The C1 has a better matte (less glossy) on matte and possibly an ever so slightly better gloss on gloss finish (less fuser scratch issues that are slight but perceptible if you look). With the 242 slowing for enhanced gloss mode the speed gets closer on gloss (not sure how fast the C1 runs on heavy coated) but the 242 also allows me to print color 3x faster on uncoated which is substantial. And the C1 would have cost me about $30,000 more over 5 years at the volume I'm printing and the quality of my 242 is very good both black and white and color, the consistency is excellent to my eye and I like the modular setup so far. It's form factor is quite small, but it's proven to be a very capable machine, at least for the first 80,000 prints.

If I have the budget for another machine, it will be another 242 - I'd have no reservation about buying another one if I have the work for it (unless I have enough to go for a 700 which I'd definitely consider based on my experience with the 242 if it matches the quality but gives me quicker easier registration)

 

I have experienced this same problem on my 240 and 242. The heat caused by the first pass definitely distorts the sheet. Even more distortion occurs when sheets aren't acclimated to the environment or have been sitting around for too long and have been exposed to great variations in the environment (humidity, temp). The distortion also varies greatly with the brand of sheet used.

As far as settings to the fuser I didn't know this was possible. I'm leasing the 242 so maybe that isn't an option available with the lease? Anyone know anything about this?

 

Sorry, my quote about adjusting the fuser was not very clear. What I meant was choosing another setting from the paper type menu. Just because you are using, say, coated paper you don't have to use the coated setting, we have found that some of our papers work better on different settings. If we use the "correct" setting for our 200 gsm gloss paper it blisters so we use the setting below which works fine, for example.

 

First, I have to say this forum is great!

I have a 242 w/light production finisher on the way for a 15 day trial.

Anything I should be looking for, I now have a Biz Hub C350 and can't wait to see it go, it's junk.

 

Registration is the only thing I find takes a bit of time and skill to get spot on with my 242. And skew is the only thing I can foresee that you might not love about the 242. That's where I'd focus if you have a xerox tech on site demonstrating. Overall I love printing on my 242 every time I send it a new job - I still actually find myself saying "I love this printer" occasionally about the doc 242 when I print something on it after printing a job on my old canons! (which I thought were really easy before getting the docucolor!)

 

Thanks for the great write up on the 242. How does it compare with the Canon Imagerunner c5185?

 

I don't know -- I was interested in getting a canon 5185 here but was told the maintenance would be difficult in my location compared to my current set of irc 3200 and 3220 machines at that time. I still have the canon 3200 and 3220 running with 1.5 million 11x17s between the pair now and really like those canon machines as I've spent so much time using them they're like family. The docucolor though is way ahead of those two color imagerunners in quality on both black and white and color quality and consistency, plus I have the option of running nice gloss on the docucolor and the click rate is half what we pay for the canons for color. (and the docucolor has such better black and white quality that even though the cost isn't such an issue for black clicks, I find myself not wanting to run many jobs on the canon any more - the docucolor just does a nice job laying down nice black black in solids and consistent beautiful grayscale for black and white screens and photographs.) The canons do have a nice pastel artsy color look sometimes, but the docucolor is so much tighter in resolution and registration between colors on edges and angles that overall I prefer the docucolor for color as well. I remember when I looked at the canon 5185 samples they were somewhat ahead of our 3220, but it would have to be much better on several fronts (cost per print, no jitter which intermittently caused quality issues with our 3200/3220 with medium gray tones for example, stronger blacker black, etc.)

I see a lot of comparisons between the konica minolta and docucolors, but I haven't seen a direct comparison between a docucolor and a c5185. Hope someone posts here who has used the two side by side.

 

I've been running a DC252 for about 14 months now. I would say front to back registration is the weak link and the production finisher is good for small booklets. Overall though I'd get another one, print quality is superb. Biggest complaint I have is that I haven't been able to keep it as busy as I would like only running 35k average per month.