Ricoh GelSprinters and Windowed Envelopes

[mrwho]

Hello there guys and gals.

I'm here in search of some good advice from experienced people regarding the gel printers from Ricoh.

We have a customer looking for a solution to print his windowed envelopes - which for obvious reasons can't be printed on his regular copier.

I was thinking on suggesting a Gelsprinter to do the job, but I've been told that the printheads on these machines die fairly quickly when printing mostly windowed envelopes, making this an highly expensive machine to maintain.

What's your take on this? Is this true? If so, roughly how much percent of the expected lifecycle of the printheads is lost by printing only windowed envelopes?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

[blackcat4866]

I can't comment on how this applies to a Ricoh GelSprinter, but I have had some experience with window envelopes and an HP LJ9050 with the Large Capacity Tray.

This customer prints pay vouchers (with window) flat, then folds them. I don't know where they buy them, but they do survive laser printing under these circumstances:

1) They must be a standard size. These are Letter R. They won't feed Letter.
2) Do not use heavy paper settings. It melts the windows.
3) Do not load more than 200 pages of this media. The window adds thickness in the area around the window. You might think that the additional thickness would be neglegible, but in fact, the paper stack gets a pronounced crown to it. When you get up to 500 pgs, the paper empty sensor does not touch the paper stack at the rear when the lift mechanism has reached the proper height in the center (a difference of 8mm).

That is the main job that this printer is used for. You might want to consider it as an option. =^..^=