At the Chennai Print Expo from 18 to 20 April 2014, Ricoh launched the Pro 8100S and 8110S and the 8120S cut sheet black and white production printers. These printers were aimed at the high-speed book production segment. All three models have a duty cycle specification of up to 3 million A4 pages-per-month, which provides reliability with the capability of handling high volumes. A fastsingle pass duplex scanning document feeder is standard on the Pro 8100s Series, providing up to 220 impressionsin duplex per minute scanning speed.
Ricoh enters signage segment
At the Eastern Print Pack 2014 held on 27 to 30 November 2014 at the Milan Mela Complex at Kolkata, Ricoh introduced two new machines. Ricoh launched the new Ricoh Pro 7100X and Ricoh Pro 7110X series printers that use the vertical cavity surface emitting laser VCSEL technology for razor sharp offset like image quality on a broad media range up to 360 gsm. The drum and toner machine uses five drums including one for clear dry ink like a spot varnish with the ability to highlight images and make them pop off the page and draw attention to headlines or variable text. The printing resolution is 1200 x 4800 dpi while the robust machine has a duty cycle of 700,000 pages a month making it suitable for the high volume mid-segment commercial printing market. Supported by EFI workflow solutions it comes with option of being attached to the Ricoh professional booklet maker with an optional fore-edge trimmer.
The Ricoh Pro L 4130 / L 4160 wide format printers are essentially meant for printing signage and POP display materials up to 10 feet wide for both indoor and outdoor advertising and large display. With indoor office and mall advertising picking up, a new demand for indoor retail POP advertising has been created, that is clearly different from outdoor advertising dominated by hyper competitive ad agencies. The on demand Piezo inkjet systems deliver 7-colors of latex inks printing CMYK plus orange, green and white. It has the capability to print on a wide range of substrates like polyester, textiles, synthetic paper, coated and uncoated paper, PVC and tarpaulin at a resolution of 900 dpi X 1200 dpi. A Ricoh Software Rip is provided with these printers.
New service strategy
At Eastern Printpack Kolkata, Ricoh unveiled its new marketing and servicing strategy making click charges optional. Abhijit Mukherjee, COO, PP-BU forRicoh India and Anjana Saha national business and marketing manager, in an interaction with Indian Printer and Publisher in December 2014, explained the reasoning behind thisstrategic change byRicoh to meet customer expectations in a competitive environment. Mukherjee says that ever since digital printers have arrived click charges have been in vogue, which essentially covers maintenance and servicing and compensates for the coating,the powdered ink or the toner and other consumables.The concept of click charges is a 30-year-old trade practice when digital printing was done of high value documents and in much smaller numbers.
The ground situation has changed drastically since then. More 4-color work is being printed today then ever before whereas click charges are higher. The volumes have gone up hugely with the larger commercial printers located in the mass markets of the metros doing 2,00,000 plus copies each month and the ones in the B-Class cities touching 50,000 copies. Commercial printing rates have crashed to below Rs 10 for A4 size prints in the large metros making uneven risk and profit sharing. “We thought the issue needs to be addressed and hence are giving an option to commercial printersto buy their consumablesinstead of pay click charges,” says Saha.
