Impressions on new A3 MFP's

**arnh79** · 12-09-2011

They're introducing the new color and b&w A3 mfp's to Canada in the new year and I was wondering if anyone has worked on these in other regions? We're a Toshiba 1st, Samsung 2nd dealer but we're getting screwed on the high cost of parts for Tosh machines. Are the new Samsungs reliable? How's the quality? What are your costs on consumables? ie., process units, fusers, transfer belts. Are you getting the estimated life on those supplies? Any feedback would be really helpful. We've been really happy with parts cost and support for the smaller Samsungs, so it seems like a logical move to explore the full size machines.

**pacman** · 12-09-2011

Our impressions are mixed but positive for the most part, then again, we don't have a lot of them in the field....yet!

Here's what I think personally: These boxes have potential to be an absolute beast, but they can be VERY glitchy with communication errors (absolutely random ones). I've had one customer in the field that we put in a 9350 about a month and a half ago and every now and again she would call me and say there's a "communication" error. She reboots, it goes away, but it concerns me.

We had another 9350 that we had to exchange all together. Massive skewing in the laser units. After weeks of going around and around in circles, replacing everything we could INCLUDING boards, we finally just told our DSM "send us a new one" and they did. Turns out ours was a dud right out of the box. It happens, but unfortunately it happened on a demo. We were able to save the deal and give them a working one.

There is also a semi-known issue with the small finishers and brackets that align them where the holes drilled on the brackets do not line up with the holes drilled in the finisher and therefore cause finisher jams. We ended up getting the booklet finisher to replace it and now the machine works fine. We have another small finisher out there that works perfectly, so again....50/50 on opinion.

If you have an MPS tracking solution, they may not separate color from black. It'll just show up as total copies.

The color quality when compared to the CLX-8540 is a lot better, however, placed up against a Konica/NEC, Kyocera, etc. etc., there is no competition. The postscript Mac driver (as well as postscript PC) is extremely limited when it comes to color matching. I put it up against a Panasonic DP-C405 and the Panasonic blew it out of the water as far as color matching on the screen. They are GREAT for business color but lack when it comes to graphics printing.

From a tech perspective they're super easy to work on and get to all the parts. Other than some weird stuff, we don't have a whole lot of service calls on them!

Those are just what we have experienced at our company. The black and white ones we don't have any opinions on because we haven't placed one....yet.

As far as parts and supplies go, they seem reasonable, but none of the few we have are placed in super heavy environments. Light duty to mid duty, so I'm not quite sure about yields yet.

We have another dealer out here that has 20+ of the color A3's out and they told us that they have zero problems with them. I do believe them.

So, there's 2 opinions from 2 different dealers. We were early adopters and knew there would be issues, but Samsung support (at least ours) has been terrific and that's what makes the difference for us. If something is off, they're right on it. Make sure all your firmware is up to date and do not take "we don't know" as an answer if you have something weird happen. Start with replacing consumables and then go up the ladder to boards.

Overall, we're happy with them. They're definitely worth giving a shot.