PDA

View Full Version : Oce CS655 (Minolta Producct)


Custom Search


deannasockman
12-11-2009, 08:30 PM
Our company is considering this printer and I would love to hear opinions, if you have one or have heard of one. Our volume is low, round about 10,000 / month. Is it true that the service calls would be higher on this machine, givin that the volume is lower?

Stirton.M
12-12-2009, 12:39 AM
Well...

As a Konica Minolta tech here in Canada....uh...well... OCE???

Never heard of that company. Though the box looks like a re-stamped C5500.

From a personal stand point, I just LOVE these machines. Actually, not just the 5500, but the big brother 6500 and the newer variants 5501 and 6501. Personal bias eh?

As for reliability, many of our clients are very happy with these machines. One has pushed well over 4 million copies through and is set to retire this machine and go into a newer one soon.

That said....this machine would be overkill at 10K/month. This machine can chew through that in half a day without breaking a sweat.

What do you plan on doing with it?

If it is just normal office use, we have a line of office series machines that are more suited to that environment and can handle weights up to 300gsm (LCT option)...C652 is our fastest office colour and is extremely user friendly, not to mention options and features, at a fraction of the cost of the 5500 you are looking at.

As for OCE....not to diss our restamp competitors, but Rico here has our restamped boxes, and one of our customers, (who mistakenly bought this Rico not knowing it was a restamped 6500) is cursing the day he signed the contract with them. The problem was getting reliable service....he calls and it takes a few days for a tech to come around. He knows our service....4 hour response time most days...first thing next day at the latest...and it is fixed within that day, unless a rare part is needed...he will be signing with us when the other contract expires.

I cannot say what it is like south of the border though I suspect KM there is also held to this standard. I would suggest you contact KM and demo a C652 65ppm, (or its little brother, the C452 45ppm).

As for service on the C5500 (or CS655 you are looking at), service on these machines is based on running time vs idle running. Internally, the machine will periodically run itself to keep toner and drum and belt and fuser at optimum. Actually, all our products do this. Though in the case of the C5500, the consumable items will age because of this. It is a bit strange to the end user. Suffice to say, these machines are meant to run at full tilt with very little down time. The drums for example, are rated at 200K each, but we have a couple companies that have these machines that the PM cycle requires replacement and they have barely ran 100K through since the last PM.

That is a far cry different from our office line machines. I suppose you could turn the machine on and off as you need it to prevent this issue, or at least keep it at a reduced level, but generally they were not meant to be used this way. And as I said before, I cannot speak for OCE's service or how they do their sales deals, but with us, the service agreement that goes with a lease payment covers all the maintenance. Additional costs to the customer would be toner (which is added to the lease payments) and paper.

deannasockman
12-12-2009, 05:06 AM
Your info helped a lot. I work for a medium sized private golf course and our lease is ending with Toshiba next year. Yes, the machine I asked about, I knew was a Konica Minolta and the company, Oce, is a company out of Charlotte, NC.

We liked that this machine runs books and booklets without a void area in the center. I was told by the Xerox rep that this machine, in particular, would end up being serviced too much because we weren't running it like a work horse so I wanted to know just how true that statement was or if it seemed like an attempt to steer me away and revisit their machine.

In any event, thanks for the reply. It helped a bunch!

random
12-12-2009, 09:53 AM
Also be aware that Canon may have bought Oce so the support for that machine could well dry up. The 5500 is a bit better and handling low volumes than the 6500, which I can not explain.

Stirton.M
12-12-2009, 11:25 AM
Your info helped a lot. I work for a medium sized private golf course and our lease is ending with Toshiba next year. Yes, the machine I asked about, I knew was a Konica Minolta and the company, Oce, is a company out of Charlotte, NC.

We liked that this machine runs books and booklets without a void area in the center. I was told by the Xerox rep that this machine, in particular, would end up being serviced too much because we weren't running it like a work horse so I wanted to know just how true that statement was or if it seemed like an attempt to steer me away and revisit their machine.

In any event, thanks for the reply. It helped a bunch!

Xerox makes me laugh. Can't speak for other areas, but I can honestly say that here in Calgary, they provide shitty service. I'm not sure why, but they don't have many service techs and as I said about Rico, a couple days wait before you see a service guy. I service a few of our 6500s that share floor space with Xerox products and I've heard plenty of complaints about that particular issue. Print shops cannot afford the down time when it extends into several days. One shop, the owner tells me that regularly the Xerox sales rep will come around to "try" and talk him out of our machine and into some xerox equivalent. The owner's been down that path before. He wasn't impressed. What he is impressed with is how much volume he is able to get out of our machine versus the PM intervals.

Another customer, who recently bought a 5500 without any of the trimmings, just the main body with a fiery controller, have been quite happy with our machine. They've had the machine over 4 months. I recently went on a service call to them, the first since they bought it. The problem? A learning curve, the user couldn't get the machine to print properly...basically they were trying to print to 13x19, but the image being printed was 5x7. They mis-programmed the paper tray paper size. Aside from that, they were quite happy with the machine.

I noted that in those 4 months, they were only able to print 15% of a 200K PM cycle...30K in 4 months. No image quality reduction. Tell the Xerox guy he is full of crap. The other customer I mentioned who has over 4 million, I service that machine at least once a week for a PM cycle....replace drums, charge assemblies, transfer belt and fuser rebuild, starter in the dev units, clean transport rollers, replace pickup and sep tires. That customer uses the machine and the consumable support for them is very very high. The other customer who has just bought the machine, I have yet to go and visit to service the machine itself. And even if I did, the typical downtime for a 200K PM is about 4 hours, and there is no extra billing for this. It is all part of the lease agreement. I would expect you would also experience a similar thing if you bought one.

As for full bleed booklets, though I haven't tried this personally on a 652, I believe these machines are capable of printing to the bind edge. If you were in Calgary, I'd say just come on down to our office with your file on a flash stick and try it out on our machines. I don't know if you have a local branch or not, but if you do have one, give them a visit. The only reason I am recommending this office series is because of the price tag difference. Print shops buy this production series because of the volume income outweighing the price of the machine.

And as a side note, the 5500 has limited options relative to the 6500. The 6500 has many finishing options, one of which is a trimmer for booklets. It trims off the overlap that occurs when multiple pages are bound together and folded, giving a nice flat edge. But again....price prohibitive. At last time I looked, a fully loaded 6500 ran at somewhere just over 100G Cdn. Base model at about 50G Cdn. The C652 I think is about 25G, though I cannot say for certain.

deannasockman
12-12-2009, 03:27 PM
I've had my experience with bad equipment, starting with Toshiba. The mere mention of that word makes me burn with fury. 4 years ago, our company signed into a lease with Toshiba Business Solutions and it's been hell since. We got suckered into the 3100 series and has been a total nightmare. Not one person with this company could train me on the Fiery, I had to learn it myself and it took me 2 years to master it. Mostly because I got so frustrated, I gave up periodically. I begged the company to refer me to someone that had the same machine so I could learn it but was unsuccessful. The IT rep made a sad mistake of leaving on my voice mail they provided plenty of training (even though NOT ONE person could tell me how to run it from my PC) and that the problem was "user oriented". We also had constant trouble with the duplexer.... which was also "user oriented" and after e-mailing him back and CC every person's business card I had from the company, I got a case of paper, an apology and eventually, his job. I might be a girl but I guarantee you, I am far from stupid. I can service my own Minolta.

From the opinions I have here, it sounds like this machine is pretty reliable. I'm not afraid of Oce being bought out by Canon. That is a minor change, in my opinion. However, other reps try to use that as a downfall for the company. Very poor salesmanship.

Thanks for your input. I really do appreciate your opinion.

Stirton.M
12-12-2009, 06:43 PM
Not a problem.

Any further questions on these machines, we're here to assist.

deannasockman
12-12-2009, 07:40 PM
By the way, your quote is hysterical and gross! :D

Mike Harden
12-12-2009, 10:34 PM
I now own a print shop and have work as a factory rep for over 40 years. Last factory was Oce they are now owned by Canon and the machine is a rebrand done also for Ikon as well. The machine is a tank we run ours (Konica) day and night when we first got the unit we had not broken away form other unit in production and our volume was low NO PROBLEMS with Low or High volumes. We just got rid of a X700 and there where problems with the fuser and differnt paper sizes causing winkles was one of our biggest problems and low volume forget it the 700 was a pain in the bu....dget. As for Oce nothing but great factory and end user support best company I ever worked for.

deannasockman
12-13-2009, 12:14 AM
AWESOME! Wow..... I keep hearing good stuff on this machine. I didn't think low volume was an issue. I felt it was the rep's way of trying to discourage me. Thanks a bunch for the input.

Stirton.M
12-13-2009, 07:41 AM
By the way, your quote is hysterical and gross! :D


:confused:




Groucho is not gross :p

deannasockman
12-13-2009, 10:16 AM
HA!

Custom Search