Inkjet Wholesale News aims to provide updates on the latest significant occurrences in the field of printing. Whether it’s the launch of a new technology or volatility of market prices, we’ll be here to give you the lowdown on what happened, when it happened, and what it means!
OEM Announces Ricoh Pro 8200 Monochrome Digital Printers
Ricoh has announced a whole new series of monochrome digital printers. The Ricoh Pro 8200 series is actually an upgrade on the existing Ricoh Pro 8100 series. The Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) released the new series during the Open New Worlds event that it was conducting at its Customer Experience Centre (CEC), located in Telford in the United Kingdom.
As per the OEM, the Ricoh Pro 8200 series of monochrome digital printers possesses some key technical modifications and feature updates when compared to the Ricoh Pro 8100 series. In a nutshell, the new series will contain printers that will print at faster speeds, offer more versatility with respect to media handling, and even be able to handle heavier weights than the 8100 series.
The Ricoh Pro 8200 series will consist of five new monochrome digital printer models, three of which also have inbuilt scanners. The announced Ricoh Pro 8200 monochrome digital printer models are the 8200s, the 8210s, the 8220s, the 8210, and the 8220, with the latter two being without scanners.
These printer models are all capable of generating prints at a good clip. The print speed of the 8220s and the 8220 is 136 ppm, the 8210s’s and 8210’s is 111 pages per minutes (ppm), and the 8200s is 96 ppm. Furthermore, each of these printers can handle a wide array of media in terms of their size and weight. These printers accept sheet sizes up to SRA3 to a maximum resolution of 1,200 x 4,800 dots per inch (dpi). Similarly, weights the Ricoh Pro 8200 series printers accept range between 52gsm and 350gsm. It is notable that the printers also accept textured stock.
The Ricoh Pro 8200 series printers also allow for pre-printed to be incorporated into the printing system before the binding process. They allow this functionality through the placement of a high capacity Plockmatic HCI3500. The Ricoh Pro 8200 series printers aren’t only versatile and flexible but also highly durable. This is evident in the fact that each of them has a monthly duty cycle of one million A4 pages per month.
The positioning of the Ricoh Pro 8200 series is also interesting. The Marketing Development Manager of Ricoh, John Blyth, specified that the OEM doesn’t view this series as particularly ground-breaking or revolutionary. Instead, the Ricoh Pro 8200 series represents an improvement on the “success and proven qualities of the 8100 series”.
Along with the launch of the Ricoh Pro 8200 series, the OEM also announced its future plans. As per the announcement, Ricoh will be introducing two new Direct to Garment (DTG) printers to the market on the back of its acquisition of AnaJet, a well-known DTG print manufacturer. The acquisition of AnaJet took place at the beginning of the current year.
That acquisition gave Ricoh the ability to launch their new DTG printers. The announcement pertained to the release of the R13000 and R16000, which the OEM plans to launch within the first six months of 2017. The DTG printers will utilise water-based pigment ink for colours CMYK and white. Furthermore, they’ll also have various print table options.
The two Ricoh DTG models are fairly similar to each other. The primary difference between the two is the number of print heads. The number of print heads in the R13000 is three while the R16000 possesses six print heads. Both printers will be able to spit a black garment in about five minutes while a white garment will only take three minutes.
These R13000 and R16000 aren’t the first DTG printers launched by Ricoh. In August last year, Ricoh announced the AnaJet mPower mP10i desktop DTG device. More importantly, Blyth specified that the OEM is looking at more launches in the near future.
Xerox Split Underway Amidst Five Different Lawsuits
The great Xerox split has been on-going for a while now. We first reported on the Xerox split in February this year. In July 2016, more details of the Xerox split emerged and were subsequently reported on this blog. The year end is nigh and, as per the latest news; the Xerox split is on track, more or less. The problem for Xerox, however, is that they’re dealing with many other problems along with the split.
For instance, there are five different lawsuits that Xerox is dealing with right now and each of them is significant. Three of the lawsuits that Xerox is currently fighting are filed by their own employees while the other two are class action lawsuits.
Of the three employee lawsuits, two pertain to gender-based discrimination. The first of these was filed in October by an African American engineer who used to work for the OEM. Another gender-based discrimination lawsuit was filed by a former sales representative of the company in Michigan.
In that case, the accuser claimed that she had “experienced a pattern of gender-based discrimination at her workplace”. Specifically speaking, the accuser says that her manager not only made some gender discriminative comments against her but also fired her even though she had met her sales quotas.
The third employee-related lawsuit against Xerox was filed by a former employee of the Xerox Business Services, LLC who had become disabled while at the job. According to the accuser, in this case, he is suing Xerox and MetLife, the associated insurance company, because they denied both short and long term disability benefits due to him. His lawsuit revolves around the flouting of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by MetLife and Xerox.
Of the two class action lawsuits, the first is filed by the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System. The case in question is a securities class action wherein the accusers state that the product they purchased from Xerox failed to deliver on the promises made by the company. The product around which this case revolves is “Health Enterprise” and the accusation is that it didn’t deliver the promised “high profits”.
The last lawsuit that Xerox is challenged with is a class action lawsuit filed by an Illinois resident, Linda Steil. The case is filed against Xerox Educations Services, LLC. Supposedly, Steil received a letter from Xerox in September asking her to pay a debt going back to her time at the Wesleyan University. Steil, in her lawsuit, stated that she attended the university between 1988 and 1993 and had paid off her debt more than a decade ago. Her complaint was that Xerox was trying to collect a delinquent debt for third parties.
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