KeepItPrinting.com

[arlen]

We've had our 860 for about 3 years it has been a great addition to our production facility. Additionally we have several out in the field that we service and maintain. We have found them to be quite reliable, aside from some occasional cleaning and few software concerns, we are not spending much time or money on these. We use ours mostly for CAD and graphics applications.

That said,we are considering selling ours and replacing it with a series 900 machine, mostly for speed and volume considerations. so we are wondering if some of you who have them can tell us how they are preforming. Here are a few questions in areas we would like to know about.

1. Compared to the 800 series, have you found the print quality, for CAD and graphic printing, to be equal or better?

2. Compared to the 800 series, have you found the service and maintenance costs and time to be better or worst ?

3. Have you found any difference in toner consumption between an 800 series machine and a 900 series machine?

4. Are there things you like better with the 900 series over the 800 series?

5 What is your overall opinion of your 900 series machine?

6. Anything else we should be aware of?

Thanks
Arlen

[maggoolee2525]

glad to hear that the 800 series is performing well and with the least amount of maintenance .....comon u guys ....why so quiet over just an opinion....i dont own a 900 but i definitely would second arlen on this.....SO PLS YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS ARE ALWAYS WELCOME.

[jedi4342]

We got raid of all the KIPs from our shop. Only running HP PageWide. And we love them. Fast speed, drawings look great. But it is not a graphic printer. Very low down time. Repro shops going for several months with any service calls.

[scott]

For low volume B/W the Kip might still be good but the pagewide is simply a better product. I can tell you a lot but the point I want to drive home is that we had 3,100,000 sqft before we needed a service call. Yes, I said that correctly, 3 million before we had any service issues. And that was a PM, we have not had a single failure on our 8000XL, no printhead, no drum, no fuser, no rebuilding of the poorest developer unit I have ever seen.

If you like the Kip 800 you will like the 900 but unless you want to keep Kip because of self service or you are a dealer you need to look at the HP.
_________________
Any ideas expressed are figments of my imagination.
Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

[maggoolee2525]

Scott ....that is exactly why i have both machines ......and my dedication towards it.....3 million.....prints on the HP ..thats wonderful.....i cant imagine us having those volumes over that period of time .....what does an end user pay on the meter for this overall performance .....

[scott]

We have both a Kip 970 and a HP 8000XL. I was a little harsh on Kip yesterday. That was because I am having yet more image quality issues with the 970 so I was a bit pissed off.

I service the 970 and we have an HP dealer come out and service the 8000, I can't without the service dongle and we are too small to get a dealership with HP.

I need to get a firm cost for the Kip this year, but last year the 970 cost $0.036 per square foot for service parts, not including toner or paper. The HP does not have a service contract, it's purely time and materials. I've put in a cutter and we had the tech out a few weeks ago for a PM, total cost just under $4,000 and lets say the cutter cost $1,000 making $5,000 the total cost for service parts on the HP.

$5,000 / 3,000,000 = $0.0017

I know ink is a lot more, but in the end even if total cost is more per square foot on the HP, the reliability, speed and consistent print quality is worth it.

For low volume users the 600 is likely the best solution, inkjets hate sitting. But for higher volume users, particularly print shops, the HP is a better choice. I hate saying that, I have known the people at Kip for years and think the world of most of them. But Japan dropped the ball engineering the 800/900 series. I'm not an engineer so I won't give many opinions on changes they need, but it could have been engineered better. The transfer belt removal procedure is a joke, it needs to be on actual rails and if they would drop the pressurized dev roller and switch to a magnetic roller they could get the dev rollers and drums smaller. Plus they put the damm developer units on top of the drums which then sits on top of the image belt. Any toner leakage drops onto the drum and the belt, causing a variety of issues we have all dealt with.

Okay, I'm ranting again. I guess it's because I stood behind kip for a good long while and they never delivered. Maybe toner never will.

The Doc said it in 2016 - "Toner is dead."

http://www.kipforum.org/viewtopic.php?t=7150
_________________
Any ideas expressed are figments of my imagination.
Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.