Ricoh is today announcing the Pro C9200 cutsheet press to replace the Pro C9100 series machines, including a host of improvements over the previous generation machine.
It follows the introduction in January of the Pro C7200, launched officially at the company’s Art of the New open house in Telford last week. The first installation in the UK of the five-colour machine is underway at an unnamed customer.
Like its predecessor, the Pro C9100 is a four-colour machine, increasing its speed to 135ppm and stock range to 450gsm maximum. There are improvements too to the formats the press can handle. This extends to 1,260mm single-sided banners and to duplexing a 1,030mm long banner.
The press is positioned to take on more jobs transferring from offset, offering colour consistency across a longer run through auto correction systems as part of the improvements over the previous press.
“People wanted stable colour and more media versatility to drive down the cost of ownership and to handle longer runs,” says a spokesman.
The same 4800dpi VCSEL laser is used for imaging with additional sensors to manage colour and feedback adjustments that are needed to the imaging head. This checks the image against the original raster as it is collected on the image transfer belt. A daily calibration routine is used to set a baseline for the machine and colour quality is measured against this throughout the day, checking every image that is laid down.
The media profiling is improved to include the effects of print on registration during printing. Ten sheets are printed to calculate deviation on the first side, another ten to check registration on the reverse and a third batch of ten sheets is used to create the precise back to back registration. A final sheet is printed to detail the corrections needed to image stretch and skew to give the exact registration. This becomes part of the media profile and is logged in the library.
Registration is also improved by switching to a litho-like side lay, especially for longer sheets, instead of making adjustments to the leading edge.
There are also improvements to grayscale printing with stronger blacks and precise midtones. As before, paper bins and toners can be replenished on the fly.
The net effect, Ricoh believes, will be a great improvement to the number of sheets per hour that the press can produce and a leap in terms of colour consistency and quality, both opening up the ability to address longer runs. A TotalFlow workflow will improve this further with the ability to control output across several presses simultaneously with links to MIS, variable data application, and a number of litho workflows, Prinergy, Prinect and Apogee among them.
Gareth Ward
The Pro C9210 includes features to improve performance over longer runs enabling it to take a greater proportion of litho work says Ricoh.
