I've got an LJ4+ in my office and an LJ4 at home... cheap to run, reliable, etc. I keep a wreck for parts.Originally Posted by fixthecopier
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I've got an LJ4+ in my office and an LJ4 at home... cheap to run, reliable, etc. I keep a wreck for parts.
If you are hitting your head up against a wall it always feels better when you stop.
Life of a copier>>>
1. does it still do what you want it to do?
2. is the down time for repair ok? (old machines may take days,months,years to find parts)
3. is the cost to keep the machine better than replacement?
If you answer no to any of these, it is time to replace.
Yes, I am here to fix your machine. No, your machine went out of warranty 18 years ago.
Here in Norway I think 90% of the machines are scrapped (or sold to a low cost country) after they are 5 years old.
It is the standard leasing period of a machine. Ricoh also says the machine is expected to work fine for 5 years and a certain number of copies.
When we scrap the machines (the sale people just want to sell new all the time) the copier/MFC have reached around 5-15% of what Ricoh says they are designed to last.
People/companies here tend to buy machines that are way to large for their use. I see many of the Ricoh 1060s, 2060, MP6500 etc are replaced after 300 000 - 1 000 000 copies. And color machines like 2238 and MPC2500 are done after 50 000 - 400 000 copies.
Companies tend to buy 1 large machine and never a small one for back up. So when it stops it is allways a rush.
I remember a company that bought a Ricoh copier that printet 105 pages a minute. They had all the options installed. They printed 6500 pages a year !!! And yes.. they are NOT in business any longer :-)
I worked a year in Spain and Greece, and they used smaller machines that had to work harder and for more years - but they all seemes to have a back up machine. If a company had a machine like a 1060... they used it 5-7 million copies. At least. And they had a small back up machine that also had many hundred thousand prints. Sometimes over a million.
I remember one acounting company that had a 1060 and a small Panasonic MFC as back up. They had a 2238 and a small gel sprinter 3050sfn? as a back up too. They had software that routed all black/white jobs over 10 pages to the 1060. The 2238 took all the large jobs on color too. The 1060 had 8,5 million prints when I left. The Panasonic had about a million. The 2238 had over 1,5 million color prints and a few hundre thousand b/w. The gel springer had about 250 000 prints when I left (and it almost never ever had a paper jam).
They had people that cleaned paper feed rollers in the paper banks and the ARDF. They where were carefull when they put the paper in the drawer too. And they had large print jobs timed to start at night.
I'm sure the 1060 is still up and running, just as the other machines (even though it is about 3 years ago now).
They expected the machines could break down, so they had a back up. The tech had time to do a good job, and all PM parts was changed (except the transfer belt and pressure roller that was changed every second or third service). The customer was carefull with the machines. They expected them to last 10-15 years. The company I worked for expected to serve them this long as well. And the price the customer paid was higher for each copy then on new machines - because it was a several year old deal that was continued once every year.
A lot of companies also had a lot of small Brother, HP, Ricohs, Lexmark and so on - and used them a lot. It would be better and cheaper for them to buy a larger machine, but they would not enter a leasing agreement. They wantet to buy the copier/printer cash and use it for as long as they could. I remember changing drums for a Brother once a week (the users didn't want to do this), and I changed the fuser and laser several times. These small machines reached a million pages at least. In Norway they are scrapped when they reach 10 - 50 000 pages because the machines are dirt cheap - service costs are high and drum units are expensive. A fuser/laser cost about 2/3 of a new machine..
I would have liked to run a copyshop, and see how many copies a small machine can handle. I'm sure it could last for MANY years.
One thing that is bad is now that I work in a high cost country - the parts are priced higher compared to other countries. So it is usually cheaper to scrap a machine that to fix it. Even a machine that is 1-2 year old (on smaller models).
The service cost is too high also (190 us $ an hour, of which I get about 32).
I was at a customer today with a MPC2500 (about 2 years old I think). It had made about 6000 color A4 prints. About 3-400 b/W and 14 A3 pages. The 14 A3 pages are prints I made to test the machine when it was new...
I print more pages on my ink jet printer then they do in two years on a machine that cost that much. I wonder what the cost for every page would be. When it is scrapped I guess the average price for a page would be 3 dollars a page?
My last company did it right; they upped the cost of the maintenance contract every year (written into the contract ahead of time) and pegged the numbers to make it beneficial to the customer to swap out at the 4 year mark. Then we'd buy the copier back (or take it as a trade), clean it up and sell it to groups that may not be able to afford a new machine. And continue to make money off of the subsequent service agreement. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Everybody wins!
There are definitely too many copiers out there...too much junk too.
Someone in the copier industry told me years ago that the 10 years parts applied to copiers but don't take this as a legal opinion. I think the concept is that if you buy something you should be able to fix it for so long.
Now my understanding is that Bentley-Rolls-Royce keeps the schematics for every car they've ever made and with enough dough you can get a custom one made and that parts are to be guaranteed for at least 100 years. There's a lot of collectors and enthusiasts out there.
This is true. They are quite pricey toys...although sometimes we don't make shit on them. I'd be curious to know how much the manufacturers make on the sale of copiers to dealers.
emachines...i think walmart sold them...boy is that false advertising.
Is this on a cpc program? How much do you usually increase it each year?
Eight years from the start of production.
If the manufacturer runs out of parts or supplies early, they can discontinue technical support at any time.
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