Up against Minolta with a Rioh MP-C6501/Savin C9065 & MPC5501/Savin C9155

To me color is so subjective. What environment is this in? You need the file to print. The paper should be the same as well. This is a tough one my friend. If you can't get I would walk or low ball the deal.

Is this with or with out a fiery?

This will be a tough battle to prove without a sample file. I would educate the customer and understand the stock they are using and the application that created the file. What driver are they using? I would have them make sure each person is using the same stock. If the customer does not provide a stock for you...then make sure you use Hammermil, 98 semi-gloss to make the color pop. I would if possible invite the customer to the showroom and show them how easy it would be to produce the job....this will reassure there is no excess tweeks that were made to make the color better. Many dealers when given a file to print will use a fiery controller that will have an advantage in the end.....but they tell the customer it came right off their machine without a fiery. You want to put doubt in the mind of the buyer. So you will be honest and show them you are not using the fiery. Try to show color to a female as they interpret color differently than a male. Keep us posted on how it goes.

nice info on the hammermill 90 semi gloss, do you have a link for that?

Another great paper and highly recommended by Ricoh is Mohawk. Another is Donbar.

Hate to say it but we are a Ricoh dealer and if image quality is the determining factor you are at a disadvantage. We have the previous generation Konica Minolta color that we run in our back office and the KM blows any of our current Ricoh products out of the water on image quality. The only exception is our new production color machine.

quote:

Originally posted by Larry Levine:
To me color is so subjective. What environment is this in? You need the file to print. The paper should be the same as well. This is a tough one my friend. If you can't get I would walk or low ball the deal.

The last thing I'd do is lowball that deal. If you win it on a lowball bid and the customer isn't happy with your image quality they are going to torture you. You're going to need plenty of margin in that deal to make up for the aggrivation you are going to get out of it.

Thanks everyone for the feedback and advice. I did send them an email this morning regarding the Fiery could have been used from the K-M machine. Did not mention Paper Stock, I will make sure that is equal also. I don't have the machines in my showroom, but we do have them in the field, perhaps a field trip to a customer site is the way to go, showing them the samples right there. Then maybe K-M can do the same. Will let you all know when I do.

I did notice that the Postsript is emulated with K-M, where we have the optional Genuine Adobe Postscript3. I offered to include it for free, explaining that True Adobe is better - but I wondering if it is that much better or not. Have there been any comparisons? I hope this may have more to do with color print accuracy than anything else, but I could be wrong.

Are you still involved in thsi deal or has it been decided?

Unfortunately it was lost. The customer wanted 60 per minute for black minimum and was not concerned if color was slower, since their volume would not be very high. The K-M is 60 black and 50 color, and the Ricoh/Savin is 65 black 60 color, and I was more expensive because of that I am sure, although the pricing was not revealed to me. So they used print resolution as the reason but I think it was pricing, they just didn't want to say it, even though he said we were about even, I am thinking they were maybe $2 or 3 K less. I tried the seperate b&w mfp and seperate color printer solution but it did not work either.