Advice on Xerox 180 Versant - are they upto it?

Hi, I run a small publishing company and we use an external print company - but we're looking at investing in a refurbished Xerox Versant 180 with booklet and finishing extras.

We print fairly thick, high quality brochures and catalogues each month (approx. 3000 copies, with 64 A4 pages). So the idea printing ourselves digitally would be to use SRA3 with 4 pages per sheet.

We've had mixed advice on whether it's worth printing in-house or continuing with a 3rd party supplier. Can anyone here advise on if the Xerox 180 is up to the job? Anything higher spec is out of our price range unfortunately (like the 3100 etc).

Some suppliers have said that it will cost too much in toner and surplus, and would be cheaper to keep using the third party printing company. Others have said we can make a saving, partly due to be able to claim taxes back on toner and paper which we can't do currently when outsourcing. It would also mean we can print on-demand without having to grow to any Minimum Order Quantity, and we could do small runs of other projects/work on the side in addition...

Looking at the Xerox website, advertisements, videos on YouTube etc, the machine looks up to spec (some big numbers are stated like 80,000 pages per month etc) - but, those who have advised more negatively have worried me.

Does anyone have experience on how reliable these older machines really are, and if printing in-house can still present a decent saving per unit? Thanks for any advice and help.

 

That all depends on the stock you're using for the booklets. Every in-line booklet maker has limitations. In the case of the v180 booklet maker, it's limited to 30 sheets (120 imposed pages) of 90 gsm stock. If you're using heavier stock such as 100# gloss text which is 148gsm, then the amount of pages it can assemble decreases significantly. I linked to the general specs above, but your Xerox sales rep should be able to provide a full specification guide that shows a breakdown of how many sheets it can handle at different weights.

To determine if it will save money by printing in-house, you really just need to compare the numbers. You already know how much it is to outsource it. For in-sourcing, you need to determine how much the paper will cost, the increased electricity bill, labor for the person running the machine (someone does have to program the job on the machine, load and unload paper, as well as deal with jams, refilling toner, staples, etc). Also, most print shops have a service contract where we pay a click charge for every side of a sheet that is printed. That fee will pay for all toner, supplies, parts, and service by a tech. We don't usually pay for those individually because it's too hard to track. Once you find out what your click rate will be, add it to your paper costs, and labor costs, and you'll have your total for printing in-house. Make sure to account for down-time of the machine, and 3-5% extra paper to account for jams, setups, and misprints. The V180 is a good machine and can handle this work, but most print shops will have 2 or 3 machines for redundancy, because every machine goes down for maintenance at some point or another.

Something else to think about is maintaining quality. These machines can get out of calibration and you need someone to calibrate the machine with a spectrophotometer (which means you also need a spectrophotometer).

I used to sell production printing gear to both print shops and businesses like yours who wanted to bring it in house. It can save alot of money to bring in-house, but not in every case. You just have to work out the math.

 

3000 copies as in 3000 completed catalogs - or 3000 impressions equaling, say, 300 books? 3000 books, at 16 or so impressions a book, would be more than it can handle for sure. Plus The booklet maker is going to be quite slow for large production runs. 50 books, sure - but 150 books is going to take the work day to make. You'll need to get an inserter also if you want a thicker cover on the books (you'll pre-print those)