High Volume at Mid-Volume Prices

Ricoh will launch its 90-ppm Pro C900 at Graph Expo, Oct. 26-29, in Chicago. Already being beta tested at five sites, the C900 served up a triple debut when it showed up at drupa in Germany this spring: It was Ricoh's first time exhibiting at the big show, and it was shown with an EFI Fiery server specially developed for it.

The device uses pulverized toner for what Ricoh believes will provide a wider color gamut and improved fusibility, and outputs at 1200-dpi resolution on thick paper (up to 300 gsm) and even coated stock, supporting 12.6×17.7´´ images on sheets up 13×19´´. Showing it is serious about quality, Ricoh added an inline spectrophotometer to keep color on track.

Pricing should develop some excitement. The list price for a C900 system—including a high-capacity feed unit, the EFI-based controller and a base finisher—will not exceed $125,000, says the company. The cost per print, says Ricoh, is under 6¢ for an 11×17´´ simplex color page and about a penny for the same size simplex black-and-white page. The monthly duty cycle, at 400,000 impressions, is robust for the price point.

The Fiery platform for the device includes the MicroPress raster-based color and black-and-white workflow and the Digital StoreFront Web-to-print solution. At drupa, the C900 ran off the newest version of EFI Advanced Workstream Solution Fiery Central, a modular PDF-based production workflow, management and makeready solution.

Fiery is fully compliant with PDF/X3, a specification that enables files that can be printed predictably and correctly, and passes the Altona Test Suite and Ghent Output Suite for accurate proofing of press simulation in pro digital print environments.

Fiery supports Pantone's new color specification, the Goe System, enabling accurate spot color reproduction. The Fiery-driven Ricoh Pro C900 can generate Pantone libraries.

EFI says that its Fiery open platform and compliance with industry standards, such as JDF (Job Definition Format), PDF (Portable Document Format) and PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language), allows the C900 to integrate into overall print shop operations, including offset/digital hybrid environments and third-party graphic arts workflows as well as computer-to-plate (CTP) prepress environments.

Paper and toner can be changed while the machine is running. The system can be fitted with several inline finishing options to fully automate production: a 3,000-sheet finisher with 100-sheet stapler, punch unit, Plockmatic booklet maker, saddlestitch unit, GBC StreamPunch III and Z-folder are available. Ring binder or perfect binder units are available for producing completed booklets.

The ring binder automatically punches and binds documents of up to 50 or 100 pages with black or white rings. With the perfect binder, it can create books of up to 200 sheets with strong, glued backs. The books are trimmed at three edges.

A 10,000-sheet stacker, with a roll-away cart, transports stacked output for near-line finishing, packing and distribution.

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