What's your recommendations for a bulletproof / idiot-proof copier for teachers ?

[Hart]

This is not their jobs actually.

[copyman]

This is not their jobs actually.

Yes it is their job now a days. Most every company & school I service has their IT departments maintaining the printer fleet.

[slimslob]

This is not their jobs actually.

Yes it is their job now a days. Most every company & school I service has their IT departments maintaining the printer fleet.

Most of the schools I worked at did not have just printers other than in the IT office. Too limited in what they could do. Most wanted multi-function devices to be able to print, copy and fax.

[wjurls]

We are one of the few "in house" school district, business machine service departments. There are now only 2 of us vs 2000 teachers. Most schools are equipped with Konica Pro 1100's, and Accurioprint 2100's. We replace machines every 5 years (or sooner if we decide one needs to go) to prevent a fleet of old clunkers as was the practice in the past. We always have principals that want to keep the old machines. The answer is always "How bout' NO!!" We used to have 4 techs scrambling to keep things running. Since the replacement program took effect several years ago, things run pretty well. To answer the original question. The AP 2100's are proving to be pretty stout and hold up to teacher abuses. You just want to stock a gross of ADU release handles and a drill to extract the busted screw.

[Mako]

I've been on both the tech side and sales side for over 30 years. My humble opinion regarding copiers for schools is that whenever possible you go with a mid-volume office class machine rather than a console for any machine that rank and file teachers will get their hands on. Avoid finishers for teachers if possible. The simpler you can make a machine for school teachers the better off you will be. Console machines are too complex for school teachers and they will torture your service department. I'd rather sell two Ricoh IM2500 25 page per minute machines than one 60 or 70 page per minute console machine. The two machines would actually cost the same or even less and you'll have fewer service calls. Teachers trash copiers. They are the worst. 9 out of 10 will walk away from a jam too rather than fixing it themselves and none of them will put any care into loading the paper correctly.

[Hart]

We're pushing two 50-60 ppm instead of a single 70-80 ppm but a lot of the time they refuse because "it's slower" and they can't do the math.

[slimslob]

We're pushing two 50-60 ppm instead of a single 70-80 ppm but a lot of the time they refuse because "it's slower" and they can't do the math.

We had a school district print shop with a Ricoh Pro 1357EX. We had a problem with toner build up around the drum unit causing marks on the edges of the paper but only after running 6 and 8 page center fold and stapled booklets. What I noticed was that while the booklet finisher was processing a booklet the main frame didn't start feeding the next one but the engine was running the entire time. We had a 60 ppm trade-in with a booklet finisher that I had just finished getting ready for the showroom and I talked by boss into letting them use for the remainder of the fiscal year, they were budgeted to add a Pro 907EX with standard finisher and a Plockmatic booklet maker. The 60 ppm machine could actually do booklets faster to a much shorter paper path, the 135EX had multiple downstream.