+1 to Ricoh MFP's, I had great success with them and never any trouble finding drivers. The things are like tanks when it comes to printing.
From: James Hill [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, February 09, 2012 8:25 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Printer/Copier/MFP Contract Renewal You raise a good point. Driver reliability and availability can be crucial. Particularly as any contract entered into now would be current when an organisation might be deploying Windows 8. Admittedly as far as I know this won't be as big a change as XP ->Vista in regards to printer drives but it is important. I was pleased with Ricoh MFP's in my last %dayjob%. I was also impressed by Xerox Phaser's (3428 and 3435) for A4 printing. So much so that they reminded me of the good old HP Laserjet 4000/4050. James. From: Jon Harris [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, 10 February 2012 11:01 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Printer/Copier/MFP Contract Renewal If possible stay away from Konica-Minota they have a fair product when it works but you have to know what questions to ask and read the fine print you will find on the back of the page that says this page is blank. (It will look blank but if you use a microscope you will find the small print.) Last job purchased 2 of the same model at the same time. This was at the time that Vista was released. Printer/copier/scanner in one building was down more than up. Postscript was a $2k additional purchase and since we had two of the same model we had to purchase for both ($4k addition). (This was NOT reveled to us until we asked about it a month post purchase.) The building with the machine down most of the time was the one that needed the capacity the printer was rated for but only for 2 months out of the year otherwise it was used at maybe 1% of capacity. The other building used the printer at maybe 20% capacity and it basically stayed up unless someone got a wild hair and put in paper made from recycled paper, then it would go down within 3 reams of paper. It would also go down if we pushed to or over the capacity due to the other printer being down. Scanning was to either an SMB share or internal FTP server. I could never get the internal FTP server to delete anything unless I went to the machine and did it from the control panel. The SMB share had to be full and no security! Since the stuff being copied and scanned was covered under NDA's that was not going to happen and the internal FTP would not take/use any security either. The software they offered up to deal with the scanning "issue" required full admin access to the disk and to run. I dumped it without even trying to deal with that. The drivers were for Windows 2000. It took maybe 6 months post purchase before they finally released the XP drivers but they really seemed to me to be beta with the first time they offered them up when you attempted to load them plainly saying they were Windows 2000 drivers. About the time Windows 7 was released they finally had drivers for Vista that did not crash the system. Their sales people may "forget" to mention that the machine is EOL and if you don't ask they don't tell. We got bit by that one. Turned out the machines had been sitting in a warehouse for months. Up side was these were both color machines and did a great job of printing or copying in color. The shading was not adjustable within the printer (well maybe if we had gotten the Postscript addition it might have been) but we had other ways to adjust the shading to do what was needed. BTW the Postscript piece was a physical add on to the machine and once attached needed a service call to detach and would not migrate to another machine unless the service tech reset something inside the device. Jon On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Paul Hutchings <[email protected]> wrote: Our contract is up for renewal soon. We have an assortment of printers from small workgroup through to departmental used for everything from scanning/printing/emailing documents through to (very) light repro work in one case. Right now I'll keep it a very broad question - who have you had good and bad experiences with? We're interested in what I expect are the usual things, click count costs, service levels, is colour usage tiered on coverage or flat fee per page etc. Given the side of the pond I'm on I'd like to stick to the technology and the manufacturers rather than resellers, but of course if anyone from the UK is lurking I'd be interested to know your experiences on the service side when something's broken. Thanks, Paul ________________________________ MIRA Ltd Watling Street, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, CV10 0TU, England Registered in England and Wales No. 402570 VAT Registration GB 100 1464 84 The contents of this e-mail are confidential and are solely for the use of the intended recipient. If you receive this e-mail in error, please delete it and notify us either by e-mail, telephone or fax. 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