Digital Press Dilema

I have a Canon IRC3220 which I bought used, that I run very short run color on...the toner cost me about $400 for CMYK and is supposed to yield about 25,000 @ 5% coverage but who prints @ 5%??? I get about 8-10K average out of each cartridge...and pretty much the same for the drums I get less than half what they are rated for (40,000 @ 5%) I do good to get 20K and a set of drums runs me around $1000...but on the flip side I have no lease payment...on the down side I can't find a Canon dealer/tech that wants to service it...

I am a low volume digital color user on my Canon with about 3000 impressions per month average for the last 6 months or so (most of our business is offset printing)....so my question is what is your opinion about my situation...should I get a new machine with a big monthly payment on my small volume or should I look for another used machine with better consumables life??? Any suggestions on machines to better suite my needs?

 

Hi, In my opinion - your problem isn't the machine or cost of consumables - problem is to get it serviced. If you consider a replacement - I don't think that a Lease would be justifiable for 3000 clicks - even a $300 per month machine will automatically create a 10c per each page printed plus click cost.... Find a tech or service company, ask them for a list of machines they would take on service than shop around for nice, low count machine out of that list, I can help you with machine as we're a copier/printer dealer not just a Printing Shop.
Roman.

 

Have to agree - with only 3000 prints per month, it would be difficult to add a new machine without paying more counting the amortization of the new machine. If you have to replace it, I'll add my two cents. We ran a color image runner irc3200 and a irc3220 both on 5 year leases and put about 1.5 million on them. We also have a xerox docucolor 242 and have 1.1 million on the counter now, also leased new. When going from the canon color image runner to the xerox docucolor our toner usage printing the same monthly run changed from 12 canon toners to only 8 xerox toners to print the same coverage and actually a blacker black too. The canon toners were rated for 25k and the xerox for 30k per toner (20% more) but in practice we saw our cartridge usage to from 12 to 8. (Our machines are under contract, so we don't see a direct savings but our xerox contract does give us a lower cost per print than we were able to negotiate on the canons.)