Ricoh is a relative newcomer to the graphic arts market but over the past few years it has been busy building a presence alongside fellow Japanese imaging firms Canon and Konica Minolta. With the introduction of the Pro C900, the company’s first production colour press, it has filled what was, in the eyes of many commercial printers, a gap in its portfolio.
In the past three years the Ricoh Group has expanded on its roots in office imaging, adding production print products with the acquisition of Hitachi’s printer business and the distribution company Infotec. It has also taken a stake in Infoprint Solutions, IBM’s high-volume print division, which Ricoh will eventually wholly own. Most recently it has announced a deal to acquire Ikon, a global giant in document imaging and digital print.
“With the Hitachi and Infotec acquisitions, and the Infoprint venture, we are
absolutely committed to the production market,” says Ricoh Australia’s new general manager for Production and Business Solutions, Kathy Wilson. “The Pro C900 is the first product that is the fruit of that commitment.”
That deal-making spree gave the Ricoh Group a range of digital print technology
spanning office imaging all the way up to the latest high-speed, continuous-feed
colour with the Infoprint 5000, an inkjet machine using Screen technology. But until now it lacked its own machine in the cut-sheet production colour space.
Hitachi’s expertise in high-speed production was used in the development of the Pro C900, the first project of the merged R&D teams. While the Pro C900 is its first cut-sheet colour machine Wilson points out it won’t be on its own for too long. The R&D team in Tokyo is working on a range of machines to meet an even wider range of production volumes and applications.
Good combination
As a newcomer to the cut-sheet colour market, the company needed a USP and the
Pro C900’s big selling point is its price performance. “It offers heavy production at light production price,” says Wilson. “We’ve put a big kink in the price-performance curve.”
Wilson says that the machine’s combination of heavy-duty production features – –
including 90ppm speed, an average monthly print volume (AMPV) of 170,000 and
duty cycle of 400,000 — pitches it against high-end production machines such as
Xerox’s DocuColor 7000/8000 and Canon’s ImagePress 7000VP, but its price
competes with light-production machines like the new Xerox 700. With a price of up to œ145,000 for the machine, including the EFI Fiery workflow, the C900 is
competitively priced against its rivals.
Market feedback
The company is using the latest version of a Fiery with a graphic arts package
included, and to enable the operator to access all the features of Command
Workstation, the machine includes the FACI unit mounted onto the press.
“We found that in inplants and print-for-pay environments operators want to work on the machine itself rather than controlling it from a remote workstation,” says Kathy Wilson.
At the feed end the Pro C900 supports one or two large capacity trays, allowing up to 11,000 sheets to be held online and loading while printing. All the trays can take SRA3 sheets and they feature air blowers to ensure sheet separation and reliable feeding even for large sheets, heavy weight and coated stock.
The Pro C900 is Ricoh’s first machine to handle SRA3 sheets, which is part of a
trend for digital devices to support the larger sizes of sheetfed offset.
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