Pros and Cons from the users???

Hey, im opening up my own shop withing the next 6 months and I am choosing a supplier for my complex and heavy printing...

Ikon vs Xerox

I plan on going with Xerox for the digital press but i hope im not making a mistake...

I will be doing approx. 10,000 colour pages a day... I still havent signed a cost per click service contract or anything but if some one who has this machine can tell me

How they like it...

How is the up time?

Is it simple to use and train employees on??

Around how much are u lookin at for cost per clicks???

 

i have now been running the igen for 2 years now and its probably the best xerox machine i have run, the up time gets better the more you get to know the press (less engineer involvement) we got 1 of the first models so we had alot of teething problems in the beginning but ive heard the newer models are having less and less problems from day 1. As long as you do the maintenance requirements you should be fine. Training wise if you've ever run a smaller xerox colour machine you will pick this up rather quickly or if your a newbie this will take a little bit longer but its nothing too difficult. On the click cost i cant help you there as i dont deal with that side of things hope this helps:

 

iGens are all sizzle and not really much steak. Much better options out there

 

I'm too getting started, and due to space, we're looking at the xerox 7000 for colour...can anyone enlighten me on click charges for colour. Thanks in advance.

 

The imagepress C7000 from Canon is much better from a quality and consistency standpoint. When you factor in the captial costs and running costs, it would be a much more attractive option than the iGen, plus you don't need to worry about vent kits, air conditioners, and all the additional set-up costs that may be hidden. The quality and consistency you see from the iGens at the shows like Graphics Canada and Print World here in ontario is not what you're going to see in your everyday. Granted you could say that about most equipment, however the C7000 is better in terms of quality by far!Plus the fact you can run heavy, coated and textured stock, even some linens., at normal speed, they don't slow down, and the quality doesn't drop. Try running that on your Xerox! Good luck with your search!

 

Hai, I'm new to this iGen3. So far the last two weeks of training was ok. I manage to run a few jobs. I'm using Creo Spire as the color server.
1. So far paper with 65gsm are giving problems.
2. The creo spire only allow either Saddle Stitch or Step & Repeat. i.e. you cannot have Saddle Stitch job and the make it Step and Repeat. I do it on the front end to solve this problem.

iGen3 quality is great, and competive interms of pricing with Offset printing for quantity of 1000 and below.

 

igen 4

Did anyone see the new igen 4 go up in smoke at Drupa? Thats gotta hurt.

 

I heard something about that.
yikes...

 

OK... WELL...I'LL TELL YA ANYWAY...
The guy from Igen was a Mensche....
you know... a good egg...
you hadda feel for him..
if he hadda shovel he woulda dug a hole and jumped in...
head first.

 

I have a Igen3, great machine.

I had 2 x DC6060 before it, and there is a great improvement of quality, but the Igen3 has a big weak spot.

"50-90% black text" which is what a lot of our clients use on their business cards. The 600dpi cant give us a sharp text.

I believe the 7000/8000 do not have this problem, so my call would be stick with one of those, as i am sure you will have clients coming into the shop with that sort of work.

Neil

PS. if anyone knows of a work around for this problem let me know.

 

Ever though about using an HP indigo press?

The main current advantage Igen's have over indigo's is rip power, this is however being severly looked into and give a year and they'll be up there, I do beleive that indigo's have a better range of jobs that can be put through it's presses (series 2) rather than an igen (using the black % text as an example).

 

Printing black on the Igen

We have found a couple things that help to print sharper blacks on the Igen...

1)Making sure the text is coming over as K only and not a build. InDesign generally does this automatically, PDFs however have problems with this. We have to manually change the blacks to 0% Grey in PDFs (using Pitstop Pro) to truly get K only blacks to RIP.

2) Try printing business cards with Halftone settings at 200 DPI. On the DocuSP this is under the Image Quality Tab in the Halftone section. On the Creo I believe it is know as 200 Lpi setting, but I forget where you change that in the job properties.

 

Shipping damage or weird fluke?

 

That's not a big deal, it sometimes happens when you put too much wood in the fuser stove.