Which copier was the biggest piece of crap ever?

[tech3105]

Is it possible to clean a turd?

Besides these weren't bad - just odd. The 1224c and MP3500 - MP5000 on the other hand...

Ah, the venerable 1224c! Any machine so horrible that it's own imaging section would occassionally pop open the front cover and try to escape to find a better box does deserve dishonorable mention!

[copytechman]

I don't miss the 1224 series thats for sure! Beware the little blue liftup/drive clutch and flip mylars! Beware! (Aficio 400/401 duplex and practically the entire analog duplex line 4522-5840 series!

A!

[Hansen88]

Toshiba 4511 !!!

[anka monki]

Ah, come on, they wern't that bad! Granted the IPU board used to fail
regularly, the un-lubed fuser jammed non stop and the duplex came out of the Ark, but they ran clean!!! You rarely had to take a vacuum to them, any copier that doesnt spit a cloud of toner at you the moment you open the front cover is pretty good in my book.

I been spat on too... the filthy pigs

[mascan42]

One of the cheapest pieces of shit I ever saw was the Xerox 214. It was their first ever desktop digital model, and it seemed like they rushed it out the door just so they could say they offered a desktop digital model. The side door would never stay closed properly, causing a loud grinding gear noise and fuser jams. It also had a major paper curling problem that caused 90% of the copies to get thrown on the floor. The control panel was garbage as well, with the start button physically breaking off all the time.

But all of the problems I had on the 214 would have paled in comparison to the replacement model they were working on, if it had ever come out. I was at a conference where they showed us a prototype, and we could all see that it was a disaster in the making. To change the toner, you had to pull out the drum unit until it stopped, open a port in the top, put the toner bottle on it and twist the bottle to dump the toner in. The average customer would have toner all over the floor. Not to mention the fact that there was nothing protecting the drum surface from the customer getting fingerprints all over it while they did this. Thank God someone came to their senses and cancelled it.

[stuberg]

canon np 4540 rdf-1, 2-sided legal never worked even brand new

[KenB]

canon np 4540 rdf-1, 2-sided legal never worked even brand new

Oh the nightmares of that POS!

One of the flimsiest machines ever built - far below what we ever expected from Canon.

Remember that stupid yellow DF belt?

Eeeeeeyuk!

[vincent64]

I have to add this, I been doing this only 10 years now, but when I started, I serviced a lot of the old SF-7800 series machines, and thought they were a joke, sounded like they were taking off, motors and fans made it sound like it was a fast machine.
Then later I serviced the SF-2116/18 series, and seen a lot of ideas that transfered over from one to the other, waste toner collected in drum unit, now the U-pipe was a joke.
But the one that I think is the worst sharp I ever serviced is a tie between the SF-7700 with the doluble clam-shell top, and the AR-200 with the toner motor with the plastic shaft, and having it hid behnid everything.

[angelntx]

I've worked on alot of Canons in my years. My biggest pain in the backside/nightmare giver is the iRC6800 series. The reps sold it as a full line color unit but failed to tell the buyers that it was only supposed to be used as a business color. Headers, bullets stuff like that not 8.5 X 11 full color. The fuser was too soft, you could leave you fingers inprinted around it. When we told the VP about the issues he said he would need to show them the problem but delicatly. I suggested he hit one of the engineers over the head with a show the imprint of the guys head on the roller. Thank the copier gods above they stopped selling that goat. Ya know come to think of it that entire fuser was a parts eater.

[vincent64]

All these machines that everybody came out with to do color, business color its called, or a b/w machine with color capabilties, like the iRC6800 series by cannon just mentioned, or the imfamous TE 3511/4511 vwith the rotating color system, sharps BC 260/320, not too bad, but not greatest, but like all of them, sales pushes it where it should never go.
Years ago sharp had the right idea, with the old SF-2022/2027, whats that you say, color from a analoge b/w, yes, if you wanted color, you pulled the black dv unit out and slipped in the color unit, either red, green or brown I belive was the ones I recall for it, I did at one time have a cust with a red dv unit for that machine.
Life of dv was I want to recall half of the black dv, or about 40K or so.
I got to thinking on this, if we can ever fix sales and stupid operators of the machines, our jobs at service techs may not be too bad.

[mascan42]

Years ago sharp had the right idea, with the old SF-2022/2027, whats that you say, color from a analoge b/w, yes, if you wanted color, you pulled the black dv unit out and slipped in the color unit, either red, green or brown I belive was the ones I recall for it, I did at one time have a cust with a red dv unit for that machine.

I recall Xerox having something similar with the 5322. There was an empty space where a second, smaller dev unit could go if the customer ordered it. The sales guys sold it as a machine that could print B&W with color highlights. How do you add color highlights to a B&W original? Easy: there's an editing pad built into the doc feeder, where you would place your original and trace with a stylus where you wanted the highlights to go or where you wanted to erase parts of your original. Then the page would make a second pass through the machine and lay on the color. I guess it was actually fairly sophisticated for an analog machine, but it also made it so expensive that nobody bought the option.

[Simons]

I realize we are talking about crap of the crap but I thought I just had to add the canon ir c5800 c6800 series business color copier. What a labor intensive POC it is!!! Sold new for 25k to customers and could be found on ebay 2 years later for $1500 bucks with 160k clicks. Today they float around on ebay for $800.00 too much.

[apump]

NP6012, iR5070, NP210, NP2000 just to name a few..

[RRodgers]

Since some of my customers "might" use this forum and I KNOW my boss does, I'm afraid that I can't really say.

[Barcode]

We all have known some better some worst, but one of the worst series I had experienced happened to be the first I ever worked on: Xerox 5034 and its following series: Because, instead of killing the design after they realised it was a looser, they tried to increase their CPM with the 5626,5830, 5334 and so on. That technology was based on a photo belt module that couldn't make its 10K good copies. Sometimes even at opening the box, the damned part was faulty. That is not a score for a 25-30 CPM. A plastic frame in a clamshel architecture the endusers were so happy to crack whenever they had enough with paper jam and poor copy quality. The firsts ones use to make a self adjustement of copy at each time you would turn the machine on. Tthat in fact was reducing background by increasing mainly voltage on exposure lamp, therefore ending by burning that thin photoreceptor film. Not talking about the quick wear of their "natural latex" feed rollers. Thanks its all over.