Unusual machines / why did they build it?

[10871087]

Just had a good idea for a new discussion. What was the most interesting, unusual, useless, specialty, one of a kind, or re-engineered machine or accessory you ever worked on. What was it, who made it, and what did it do or try to do. NOT the crappiest, fastest, or biggest (that is a different discussion) but the strangest thing you have seen.

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I'll start with a fine 1996'ish offering from the always industry trailing, Mita Copystar America. The Mita DD-1 was basically a small Laser printer that dropped the printed pages into the document feeder of an analog copier and started a run of copies. The thing had a print driver that would allow you to send the print/copy job with option like staple, punch, dpx & qty. It actually worked but it was pretty stupid from a technology standpoint since most of the other manufacturers were already well into their first generation of digital machines. I saw a few in showrooms but never saw one get sold.

[Ianizer]

Ricoh 1224c.

Why?

Oh yeah...
And Ricoh 1232c.

Faster Why?

-I

[mojorolla]

Anyone remember the color fax machines...?

[10871087]

Ricoh 1224c.

Why?

Oh yeah...
And Ricoh 1232c.

Faster Why?

Was the question really that difficult to understand?

[Hemlock]

Most WTF-ish: a tractor feed system for some of the old Oce' doc feeders. Designed to take the old line printer paper (green & white alternating lines, holes down the sides, continuous feed) and allow you to copy it to cut sheet. Only saw one out in the wild, never saw it used - probably a good thing.

[Ianizer]

Was the question really that difficult to understand?
Evidentally.
Did I answer improperly?
-I

[ss12]

Anyone remember sharp sf-8400?this had an edit function which worked with a red marker pen,never really worked properly if at all.once had to set one up which had to be done in a darkened room and by adjusting varistors on the edit board.total pita

[Jules Winfield]

Mita DC-2055 series with the editing tablet on the top of the platen cover. You used the little plastic stylus that came with it to select areas of the copies to mask out. Totally useless function. Never ever saw it used...

[10871087]

Most WTF-ish: a tractor feed system for some of the old Oce' doc feeders. Designed to take the old line printer paper (green & white alternating lines, holes down the sides, continuous feed) and allow you to copy it to cut sheet. Only saw one out in the wild, never saw it used - probably a good thing.

I had 1 customer that used that option on a Mita DC-8585 and it actually worked pretty well except you had to tend to the exiting pinfeed original to keep it folding correctly or you would end up with a mess.

[charm5496]

the Canon NP-4080 had a color cartridge CD unit changer that held 4 seperate color cartridges and would rotate them in and out as the customer selected for copying....This thing would give me nightmares it was such a mechanical disaster!!!!

[JimHegs]

Mita DC-2055 series with the editing tablet on the top of the platen cover. You used the little plastic stylus that came with it to select areas of the copies to mask out. Totally useless function. Never ever saw it used...

I have had one of those edit pens sitting in the pencil cup on my desk for the past 8 or so years, I'm glad i'm not the only one who knows what they are. I never saw a customer use it either but it was cool on a demo.

10839

[Jules Winfield]

I haven't seen one of those in years...

[copyruss]

Way before digital copiers. Mita 900d Express. Was a modified 900d made to print reverse image transfers - like for t-shirts & coffee mugs. Had a second lense in the optics to achieve the reverse image. Special toner that was expensive as hell - like $45/gram. Had no clue it was a special machine until I ran a copy - imagine my surprise seeing a reverse image test chart that was in perfect focus. Just did a search and someone is trying to sell one!

Repos4Resale Repos4resale has just received an Xpres (http://repos4resale.com/display.php?cartid=201107146859620&zid=1&lid=1&psku=xpresmita_0308&mode=sp)

[KenB]

There were a few...

1. Canon had a CFF (computer forms feeder) attachment for the NP6060. It was a tractor feed doc feeder that would copy onto letter sized paper at a preset reduction ratio.It would swing into place on a pivot.

I had precisely one of 'em, and it never worked from Day One.

2. Canon had a PC (DOS based) fax server around 1994 or so. All it ever did was constantly lock up, and the fax board it used, while a name brand, was a joke. It would only work with a Novell network with Windows 3.1 clients.

3. While a number of companies made them, G4 fax never did actually take off. When it worked, it was great - super fast and really good quality - but that's when it worked. There were so many different protocols out there that nobody ever standardized on one.

Sadly, I had a few of these - at a trucking company, a library, and a bank.

[10871087]

3. While a number of companies made them, G4 fax never did actually take off. When it worked, it was great - super fast and really good quality - but that's when it worked. There were so many different protocols out there that nobody ever standardized on one.

Since you bring up ill-conceived fax items:

Mita had an Ai-1515F forever ago that could send an 11x17 fax which was cool selling point for architects and design people. The problem was that the only way the feature actually worked was if the fax on the RX end was also a 1515F (which it never was). This was detail the sales rep never fully explained so I spent more then a few service calls explaining to customers why the people on the receiving end of the faxes would receive the fax "shrunk" down to 8.5x11.

It went something like this:

TECHNICIAN: You need another one of these machines on the receiving end for the 11x17 faxing to actually work.

CUSTOMER: Huh... the sale rep said it will send an 11x17 fax

TECHNICIAN: I'm sorry sir, the fax machine on the other end of the conversation has a max paper size of 8.5x11 so it is physically impossible for them to actually receive your document onto 11x17 paper

CUSTOMER: Huh... the sale rep said it will send an 11x17 fax, and my client said it came on the small paper on their end.

TECHNICIAN: Yes, I understand what you are saying but if the receiving fax can't even physically hold 11x17 paper then it certainly can't output onto 11x17 paper.

CUSTOMER: Huh... now I'm really confused... the sale rep said it will send an 11x17 fax, and my client said it came on the small paper on their end.

TECHNICIAN: The only time that feature can work is when there is another Ai-1515F on the receiving end of the fax.

CUSTOMER: Huh... the sale rep said it will send an 11x17 fax.

TECHNICIAN: I'll have the sales rep call you.

[Jules Winfield]

Oh my God, I almost forgot about perhaps the most ill conceived copier of all time: The Mita Ai-3030. Remember that piece of garbage? I don't know what was worse, the idiotic scanner on a separate frame design or the 50 screws you had to remove to get to the boards. Or the print system that only understood 10baseT and wouldn't work over a 10/100 hub...

[Lagonda]

A trip down memory lane!!
I'll add job card readers to the list. Installed a few but never ever saw one used.

[10871087]

Oh my God, I almost forgot about perhaps the most ill conceived copier of all time: The Mita Ai-3030. Remember that piece of garbage? I don't know what was worse, the idiotic scanner on a separate frame design or the 50 screws you had to remove to get to the boards. Or the print system that only understood 10baseT and wouldn't work over a 10/100 hub...

OMG... the top and bottom were connected by a cable with no external connector so to bring it into an office for a demo required the removal of the top and back of the printer part and the connection of about 10 connectors onto 3 or 4 different boards. If all went well it took about a half hour to setup with the customer thinking it was broken because why else would you take it apart so much just to plug it in.

[edzo666]

i remember the ricoh ft 5733 that hold a color development unit.

[KenB]

One more fax flub up:

I think it was the Aficio 270 that first offered a form of MFP faxing for Ricoh.

It required a PC on the network to have Winfax Pro (I think it was the only supported application) and a fax modem. The 270 would then connect to that PC to fax out.

Actually, not a terrible idea, but the salesman would always conveniently forget that minor little requirement.

[Jules Winfield]

OMG... the top and bottom were connected by a cable with no external connector so to bring it into an office for a demo required the removal of the top and back of the printer part and the connection of about 10 connectors onto 3 or 4 different boards. If all went well it took about a half hour to setup with the customer thinking it was broken because why else would you take it apart so much just to plug it in.

I think the guy who designed that piece of shit ended up committing hari kari. Or at least he should have...

[KenB]

the Canon NP-4080 had a color cartridge CD unit changer that held 4 seperate color cartridges and would rotate them in and out as the customer selected for copying....This thing would give me nightmares it was such a mechanical disaster!!!!

Oh the horrors!

I had precisely one, at a carpet cleaning company. I think it used about 50 photo interrupters.

Funny, I think it was called a "CD Changer" (color developer), long before there were Compact Discs.

[KenB]

Mita DC-2055 series with the editing tablet on the top of the platen cover. You used the little plastic stylus that came with it to select areas of the copies to mask out. Totally useless function. Never ever saw it used...

Canon had the same thing on the NP3000 and NP4000 series machines. Yuk!

[Sgt. Hulka]

Internet Faxing - Does any know what it was supposed to do?

[Jules Winfield]

Internet Faxing - Does any know what it was supposed to do?

They call it "email" now...

[Lagonda]

Just had a scratch around at the back of the grey cells and came up with Tape Markers on copyprinters. It was suppose to shoot a couple of inches of paper tape between job batches as they hit the output tray.
Why? who knows!

[blackcat4866]

Most WTF-ish: a tractor feed system for some of the old Oce' doc feeders. Designed to take the old line printer paper (green & white alternating lines, holes down the sides, continuous feed) and allow you to copy it to cut sheet. Only saw one out in the wild, never saw it used - probably a good thing.

Canon had a tractor feed add-on accessory for feeding continuous greenbar originals, on the NP-6060 and NP-6085. The sucker was fast, and fed well for the most part. But few techs knew that they had their own optics, so there were a lot of callbacks for dark copies, tractor feed only.

[blackcat4866]

Mita DC-2055 series with the editing tablet on the top of the platen cover. You used the little plastic stylus that came with it to select areas of the copies to mask out. Totally useless function. Never ever saw it used...

Those were kinda fun to play with once you knew what you were doing. But, yes, not much use for it.

[blackcat4866]

the Canon NP-4080 had a color cartridge CD unit changer that held 4 seperate color cartridges and would rotate them in and out as the customer selected for copying....This thing would give me nightmares it was such a mechanical disaster!!!!

That, and the color filters in the lens cover to do "color separations". It made cleaning mirrors 4 & 5 particularly difficult to clean, and was really easy to screw up. =^..^=

[KenB]

Internet Faxing - Does any know what it was supposed to do?

It does exactly what the name implies - sends and receives faxes over TCP/IP.

I have one customer who is a medical supplier. They have 5 offices over a 3 county area, but they are positioned in such a way that no one office can call another locally.

It should be noted that being a medical supplier, they are subject to the same HIPPA compliance rules as any other health service provider, so they are under a bit of scrutiny. (They can actually be sued for malpractice, just like a doctor.)

They send hundreds of faxes every day between their offices. Their phone bills were ridiculous.

Scanning to email wasn't practical, as paper copies of their documents are needed upon their arrival.

Once we set up all their Ricoh 1515s (small machines, I know) with IP faxing their phone bill was slashed by almost 80%.

[blackcat4866]

How about the infamous Binder Minder? I love the part about drilling out spot welds, and hack sawing off scanner frames to install this rickety POS scanner frame. The focus is never right again, especially color.

And what about the little booklet cover thingys that came with the Mita DC-1435/1455? There was a wire embedded in a glue strip in the binding of the booklet, and when you inserted it into the little slot on the copier, it applied a current to the wire to melt the glue. I think the only people who ever tried them out were the salespeople. =^..^=

[gwaddle]

Mita DC-2055 series with the editing tablet on the top of the platen cover. You used the little plastic stylus that came with it to select areas of the copies to mask out. Totally useless function. Never ever saw it used...

No, but it was fun to play with.

[BLADE]

There was a canon fax with a 'book mode' function, a semi detachable top with a book feeding mechanism. A great idea really

[DavePo]

How about the infamous Binder Minder? I love the part about drilling out spot welds, and hack sawing off scanner frames to install this rickety POS scanner frame. The focus is never right again, especially color.

=^..^=
Yeah Got one of tose POS's on the shelf that a customer wanted then changed mind.

[copyruss]

And what about the little booklet cover thingys that came with the Mita DC-1435/1455? There was a wire embedded in a glue strip in the binding of the booklet, and when you inserted it into the little slot on the copier, it applied a current to the wire to melt the glue. I think the only people who ever tried them out were the salespeople. =^..^=

Actually had a customer buy a box of the binders. Guess what was in the cabinet when they traded it in...

[ExXeroid]

Xerox had a family of machines code named "Crossbow" I dont remember the model numbers.
Some of the machines in this family had the ability to have a second developing unit installed (By the Customer) to give them a "Color" machine! I think the choices were Red,Green, Blue, Orange and a few others



( Lucky for me I was trained on the line after it was being phased out,I dont think it worked to well)

Black + 1 color + colored paper= Fooling people they got a full color copy.

I saw quite a few in the field traveling with other techs never with the optional developing units.

[ExXeroid]

Xerox 5046 also had a "selective editing ' feature where you could edit or delete areas of a document that had sensitive information. this was accomplished by entering the X - Y coordinates via the key pad to define these areas.

The N.Y.C. courts had a process where they would copy a document, redact the copy with a marker (preserving the original) and send the copy on to the requester.

This editing feature was supposed to "make the court clerks more productive and reduce waste"

It was never used

It was

[wizardjimmy]

One more fax flub up:

I think it was the Aficio 270 that first offered a form of MFP faxing for Ricoh.

It required a PC on the network to have Winfax Pro (I think it was the only supported application) and a fax modem. The 270 would then connect to that PC to fax out.

Actually, not a terrible idea, but the salesman would always conveniently forget that minor little requirement.

forgive me for asking this...but what's a MFP faxing?

[KenB]

forgive me for asking this...but what's a MFP faxing?

The fax that's built into a copier (MFP).

MFP = Multi Function Product (or printer, take yer choice)

[WOETC]

Toshiba had a range with interchangeable colour dev tanks. Red, Green, Blue and Brown from what I can remember. It included some of their most remarkable lemons like the BD5620. The crowning glory was the BD7720 with and edit function that was controlled with a red LED shining through the original on the copy glass. The LED was directed by a sort of Joystick and fire button. Very Unreliable.

Regarding I-faxing it was designed as a fax over internet protocol, much like VOIP. The advantage over email supposedly being cost, plus the fact that there is a legal standing to fax and i-fax that doesn't exist with email. It goes from one piece of paper to another without any possibilty of interference, so a signature can be used for legal purposes.

[KenB]

Regarding I-faxing it was designed as a fax over internet protocol, much like VOIP. The advantage over email supposedly being cost, plus the fact that there is a legal standing to fax and i-fax that doesn't exist with email. It goes from one piece of paper to another without any possibilty of interference, so a signature can be used for legal purposes.

That's why fax (in one form or another) will be with us for a loooong time to come.

[Herrmann]

once at 1989 i had to mess around with a canon microfilm reader in a newspaper archive. Never seen this before or later, the engine based on a NP200 with "negative toner" (very expensive) and there was a reading thingy, where you could insert the film rolls.... boy, what a POS

[KenB]

once at 1989 i had to mess around with a canon microfilm reader in a newspaper archive. Never seen this before or later, the engine based on a NP200 with "negative toner" (very expensive) and there was a reading thingy, where you could insert the film rolls.... boy, what a POS

We had a few of those, maybe 5 or so.

I heard the horror stories.

I was extremely happy I never had to get involved!

[KenB]

Anybody remember the Canon whiteboard?

I think it was called a C-60.

The little gem used a fax printer section to produce output, and it was on thermal paper.

You only had to remove about 50 screws to get the back cover off - that was the one and only time we were allowed to use a power screwdriver.

What a POS!

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

A few years ago Pitney Bowes had a big block like machine with a laser printer in it to print your marketing or mail piece and then it would move along to the inserter and put it in an envelope for you.

Formax has two machines that are basically a laser printer that shoots the page out the back and into a transport section and into a paper folder (actually a pressure sealer) for pressure sensitive forms. They do actually work quite well so they're a good thing, but your post reminded me of them.


Just had a good idea for a new discussion. What was the most interesting, unusual, useless, specialty, one of a kind, or re-engineered machine or accessory you ever worked on. What was it, who made it, and what did it do or try to do. NOT the crappiest, fastest, or biggest (that is a different discussion) but the strangest thing you have seen.

-------------------------------------------------------

I'll start with a fine 1996'ish offering from the always industry trailing, Mita Copystar America. The Mita DD-1 was basically a small Laser printer that dropped the printed pages into the document feeder of an analog copier and started a run of copies. The thing had a print driver that would allow you to send the print/copy job with option like staple, punch, dpx & qty. It actually worked but it was pretty stupid from a technology standpoint since most of the other manufacturers were already well into their first generation of digital machines. I saw a few in showrooms but never saw one get sold.

[kingpd@businessprints.net]

I guess about the strangest machine I can think of at the moment was this massage thing. You got on a table and were covered in thick plastic while highly intensified beams of water shot on your back in different patters. It was supposed to massage you.

[mikadonovan]

I had one of those in the field years ago. It actually ran pretty good, I guess. I never seen it much.
Way before digital copiers. Mita 900d Express. Was a modified 900d made to print reverse image transfers - like for t-shirts & coffee mugs. Had a second lense in the optics to achieve the reverse image. Special toner that was expensive as hell - like $45/gram. Had no clue it was a special machine until I ran a copy - imagine my surprise seeing a reverse image test chart that was in perfect focus. Just did a search and someone is trying to sell one!

Repos4Resale Repos4resale has just received an Xpres (http://repos4resale.com/display.php?cartid=201107146859620&zid=1&lid=1&psku=xpresmita_0308&mode=sp)

[excanonguy]

the Canon NP-4080 had a color cartridge CD unit changer that held 4 seperate color cartridges and would rotate them in and out as the customer selected for copying....This thing would give me nightmares it was such a mechanical disaster!!!!


Haha this is exactly he machine I was thinking about when I saw the title of this thread !I had several in my territory when they were new...if you disconnected the sorter with the cd changer on the side the machine would tip in that direction lol !

[copymutt]

:confused: Mid 1970's The Savin WordMaster! Take an IBM selectric typwriter engineer a baseplate that has sensors for every key to send signals to an attached box that records everything to a cassette tape.

Then simply use the cassette tape to make more or to edit the documents.

Tech school was six weeks long. No personal computers back then.

Funniest service call ever was actually at Savin tech services in Vallhalla NY @ the time. An attractive well endowed secretary kept complaining that the WordMaster kept throwing spaces in the middle of words. Not unusual as the adjustments for all the sensors & acuators was a nightmare. One of the techs had her sprinkle talcomb powder on the space bar & let us know when it happened again. Being only a few rooms away we all arrived to view the nice perky white spots on her sweater:cool:. No charge for the fix!

[blackcat4866]

:confused: Funniest service call ever was actually at Savin tech services in Vallhalla NY @ the time. An attractive well endowed secretary kept complaining that the WordMaster kept throwing spaces in the middle of words. Not unusual as the adjustments for all the sensors & acuators was a nightmare. One of the techs had her sprinkle talcomb powder on the space bar & let us know when it happened again. Being only a few rooms away we all arrived to view the nice perky white spots on her sweater:cool:. No charge for the fix!

I had a service call like that too. It was only one user that complained that when she wanted to make one copy, sometimes she got differing numbers of copies. Usually 10 but sometimes 12 or 102 She was of shorter stature, and was inadvertently pressing buttons with her chest. Trying to think of a tactful way to point this out I invited one of the other ladies in the office over to operate the machine, then her. Her co-worker gave me a wink, and pointed out the extra button presses. =^..^=