Who is using their Igen and or Nexpress for imprinting pre printed shells? I know of all the problem and things to watch for. What I am wondering if anyone is doing this in large quantities with lots of success with little to no grief from the manufacturer or service tech.

We have be running a lot as of late on our Igen3 and we are starting to get push back from Xerox. The main issue they seem to have is the life of the Rollers especially the Fuser and Pressure rollers, they are wearing about every 80-100k depending on type of paper.. They are talking about charging us for these rollers if we do this kind of work...

For those of you who do imprinting how is your vendor relationship and their stance on this type of work?

THanks for the input..

Dale Zahnke

Since I don't yet (maybe next year) have an Igen, what is their reasoning behind the premature failure of these parts? I would assume from the set-off powder.

We ran into the same thing with Xerox about charging us for the fuser rolls because of early failure. We had to force it back on them to give us credits for every time we ran a part over its expected life, since they weren't willing to do that, they backed off on the whole charging us for them part. We'd hang on to a few extra fuser rolls for the longer runs, and occasionally swap used ones they hadn't sent back yet in preprint situations. The other killer was carbonless stock. Until it was on the RML, Xerox really pushed us on the carbonless, as it was jamming all the time and curling like no tomorrow.

With the Nexpress we have so many used fuser rolls that we hang on to for such an occasion, so when we are running preprinted stuff we swap them in and doesn't cost us a thing. Kodak could care less, since we control the parts and frankly are getting extra life out of somethine we already wrote off on high quality work.

We do this for the preprinted and preperfed stocks as well as prescored and prediecut (kiss cut label stocks) that don't have a high quality requirement.

I'd love to say the same about our BW Digimaster, but since that is click based, Kodak has done the same as Xerox and threatened the charge us for parts for running preprinted. But hey, they advertise the capability and so far they have not pushed the issue. Ultimately if that was all I was running, I probably would have to pay a higher price then someone who isn't.

I wish you luck. Hopefully Xerox will allow you to continue to run the preprinted stuff without penalty. I'd hate to see them hold a customer's parts hostage (or for ransom) and frankly that was one of my biggest fears is Xerox cutting off the supplies because we were out of their desired spec or at least charge me even more for the parts on top of the click.