Colour printer/copier/scanner list advice

Hi all,

I am new to this forum
Some advice would be much appreciated on Colour MFP printer/copier/scanner (fax optional)

I have been looking at these 2nd hand colour printers/copiers listed below and i am thinking of buying one of them. All would fit the requirements as far as specs go.
- Do you have any recommendations to STAY CLEAR of specific models?
- Do you recommend any BETTER ones instead?

I am looking mainly for:
a) Reliability issues
b) Colour performance
c) Toner and drum expense

======LIST======
Konica Minolta 8020 Konica/CF2002
Konica Minolta CF3102
Canon IRC3200N
Canon IRC 2620
Ricoh 2238
Ricoh 2232
Ricoh 2228c
HP 9500mfp
Canon 2880
Canon 3080

 

personal opinion, you cant go far wrong with a konica

 

We haven't been using them as much lately, but we have 1,050,000 on one canon irc 3200 and 525,000 on another canon 3220 (99% 11x17 or 12x18 print size). I believe the 2620 is just a 3220 slowed down a bit for a lower selling price, so I'd expect it to perform about the same. Reliability on the 3200/3220 was very good for us, requiring about 1 service call ever 200,000 prints on average - we had one major issue with a gear assembly losing it's teeth for a total failure; other than that it was one sensor replacement and ITB transfer felt rebuilds when the belt began to stretch or slip on the rollers causing registration issues. If we weren't in such a remote location some of those may have been cleanings vs. belt/roller replacement. Everything else was nicely modular for us with easy fuser and drum changes. They are weak on black and white photographic performance suffering from some gray jitter that comes and goes and somewhat less black black that other machines we've had and have; but color performance has always been very good for us. I like the tonality of the color, and have not had any issues to speak of (except they won't copy skin tones well from the glass, but I never intended to use these for copiers, so not a big deal for me.)

In terms of toner expense, I do find that the real-world-yield vs. manufacturer yeild is about 2/3 to 3/4 as good for the canon toners as it is now for our xerox toners comparing the same general output darkness/tonality/solid quality. This wasn't a major issue for us since we were under service/supplies contract, and compared to other machines we've run the cost still wasn't horrible.

In terms of drum expensive, the modular drums are nice because you can easily swap them (to run a nearly-spent drum for low quality text copies for example, then put in your best for photographic prints.) But the economy depends on the % of work you run that is high quality vs. commodity because for us the canon gpr-11 drums seemed to maintain 100% quality only to about 30% yield. After that they were ok until 50% and then we started to see some issues (streaks, uneven density across the drum, more peppery print for black; loss of tonality) from 50% to 100% yield. However, for lower quality copies like office-type prints, charts/graphs/text or photographs with a nice amount of texture/detail that don't need ultra-smooth gradients or clean solids, you can run the drums to 180 to 230% yield (and I never noticed issues in the yellow, presumably because I simply can't see them in the light color.) So depending on the nature of your work, the drums can be either very economical or somewhat expensive depending if you have the prints to run at each level of quality those drums deliver.

 

I would also agree with plotter, Konica Minolta printers are a very popular range of printers and are very reliable.