I need a new BW with the best Halftone screen quality and best reliability / consistancy. I need a workhorse..

What do you recommend?

Thanks!

Dale Zahnke

have you looked at the digimaster? we have an e125 and wow, is that ever a workhorse. it seems like it will run forever and anything!

Take a look at the Ricoh production systems, they have amazing gray scales, but the black is lacking.

Digimasters are good, once they upgrade that horrible rip/dfe on it.

Inkjet array black only systems are coming soon, most are going to be roll fed but might be worth looking into around Drupa.

Hi Dale
You are more than welcome to send a file to me and I'll run some print samples and UPS them to you. This would be off our Ricoh MP9000 with 5.7 million prints (Gees I ran 300K last week???) Our main application is a catalog with several hundred halftones and an anal deadline of 5 weeks that will equate to 1,076,676 clicks or 215,335 clicks per week and I have confidence I will beat the deadline, and still run other jobs as well.

As far a a workhorse all I can tell you is I start running at 5:00am and stop at 5:30pm M-F. It has run for the last 4 days without a single jam duplexing 60lb Lynx. I ran a 3000+ piece mailer with the addresses on it (from Fusion Pro) Saturday duplexed 2 up on 80lb cover, the registration was within 1mm front to back.

I don't agree with Patrick on the black comment, as long as the PM's are completed on schedule my blacks are dense and solid, when you start to stretch out the developer then you see it on the solids.

OK just PM me your address and I'll pull off a 500 page catalog and send it to you. Lot's of solids, Gray Scales and Halftones.

Craig,

I'm going off tests based on the darkness of the blacks. They may be dense and solid but they don't measure up to digimaster or docutech black.

Take a densitometer to it, and tell me what your d-max is.

The reason why the grayscale on the Ricohs looks so good is that they don't have the typical d-max for b&w printers so they trim the gamut to give better gray.