What gloss quality does CPP 550 deliver ?

How does the gloss quality of a konica CPP 550 compare to our ancient xerox Doc12?

 

cpp 550 on gloss

I have been to a few demos and I am pretty close to buying this machine. I does very well as far as running gloss stocks. I put cheaper foreign gloss text through it and it looked great. The difference though I saw between it and my ricoh business model printer is the way the toner looked on shinier gloss. It looked a little more flat, but it looked more glossy on the duller finish type glosses. The quality was out standing and I know a printer here in town who owns a xerox docutech? not sure about spelling. He said he has never had a better color machine. He puts around 40k a month on his 550 and has had it I guess a year. He runs all types of solid color newsletters with no problem. He likes the dull gloss mainly also. I am trying to figure out whether to look harder at the xerox 242 model or go for the ikon. Ricoh is trying to compare their mpc6000 to those two. I just don't know?

 

Got our first samples from an IKON BP 560 which as far as I can tell is the same as the CPP 550 in almost all regards.

On the matte stock, the gloss looks pretty decent to my eye --
a slightly wet look that is appealing.

It does have a slight digital plasticity to it that's not quite as nice as an imagepress to my eye, but the economy and speed give the KM the advantage for the foreseeable future for me.

On the gloss stock the colors look good, but the solid black areas (text for example) look not as good to my eye -- too flat on the gloss stock. Unless the coverage is pretty uniform without any 100% density / black solids, I think I will plan to stick with matte stock for most jobs.

I have to find out on Monday whether there is also a matte mode on the 550... I'm not clear on exactly how my samples were printed as I see references here and there online to an "optional natural gloss mode" on some of the KM models.