Will it *really* change your life?
Written: Aug 07 '00 (Updated Oct 23 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, great quality color, easy to use
Cons: Jams, never as fast as we want it, finicky processing.
The Bottom Line: Better than many alternatives, and it has made life much easier.
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| pillowphat's Full Review: Xerox DocuColor 12 Printer |
When my department at work was having major problems meeting our printing needs, we were prepared to buy our own, dedicated printer/copier for our end of the office. I am on the marketing team for several real estate investment (i.e. $$$$$$) brokers. We were tired of fighting the rest of the office for color copy/print use, and my brokers were (believe me) more than ready to buy something to our liking.
But. Corporate administration (don't we love them) had other plans... a one-stop color print/copy shop for the whole office to share, and told us for months to hold our horses, hang on, they had something in the works that would change our lives, make color printing and copying a breeze, la dee da. So we waited.
The Wait
The long-awaited day arrived, and the Docucolor 12 (or Fiery as we call it) was unveiled. Many ooooooh's and ahhhhhh's were accompanied by a brief demonstration by a pretty skilled and knowledgable Xerox rep. I was pretty impressed at that time, as before I was relying solely on 2 very slow and inefficient Epson Stylus Color 850's. I felt this Fiery would be a great thing for our production needs, especially since my little department does probably 75% of the whole office's color printing. No more queuing up our dinky Epson to print all night just to barely make production needs! No more outsourcing for really nice heavy-gloss paper or boards!
Reality
After one week, a plethora of problems presented themselves to us. My department uses a great deal of extra-heavyweight glossy 8.5x11 paper for our marketing books. The Xerox rep had eagerly reassured us that the Fiery would have no problem with this, would, in fact, thrive on it, but when the machine began smelling hot and refused to print, we learned a different story. Another Xerox rep came out and accused us of intentionally using paper that we knew was harmful to the machine. Apparently our high-gloss paper had been melting inside the machine, cumulatively coating the printer fuser in an irreparable way. After replacing the fuser and ordering the (much more expensive and lower-quality) Xerox gloss paper, things chugged along fairly uneventfully.
Great Things About the Fiery
I realize that my department's printing and production needs aren't necessarily typical of mainstream use of the Fiery. Though the Fiery should be able to handle everything in the scope of what we do here, it just doesn't quite make it. For other people and other needs, I've seen the awesome qualities of the Fiery:
Speed, speed, speed. The Fiery's processor is ultra-fast. I've seen people queue up huge files, and the Fiery spools, rips, and prints it out pretty darn quickly. Especially nice is the fact that if you're just making multiple copies of an image, the Fiery scans the image and keeps the image in memory rather than re-scanning like a traditional copier. This means even more speed, and speed is everything.
Well, speed isn't *quite* everything... Quality. We had a few kinks at first in color-matching; still, sometimes I'll print something which looks like a lovely deep blue on my screen, and the Fiery will produce something much more bright and light. That, of course, is a problem, but not the Fiery's fault. More important is the overall smoothness of the picture, ink, whatever. I've been really impressed by it. Even the color copying is crisp and clear; I've been able to make a color copy of a photo from a printed brochure, then scan that copy and end up with a surprisingly high-quality image. Remember that it will take perserverance and time to get all the color-matching down pat.
Ease of Use. Not everyone who works here grew up in the age of technology. Just today I came into the copy room to see a man scratching his head (obviously his secretary was gone and he was left to fend for himself with the big bad copy machine) and staring cluelessly at our two copy centers (we also have the Xerox 9500 copy center for most black&white copying and use the Fiery as backup b/w copying). I guided him through the process of making copies on the Fiery, and he was very impressed with the ease of use. So, despite its fairly foreboding appearance it's really quite manageable even for beginners. The help and options menus are very clear and make it easy for you to choose what options you want to include in your copying.
Bad Stuff I Don't Like.
I think my main problem with the Fiery is central to the fact that I share it with so many people. People are not always considerate; they may queue up a huge job and then walk away from it, and if it gets stuck or jams then any jobs in the queue just sit and wait. A great feature which is optional is installing the Fiery Command Workstation on your PC, if you're on a network. That enables people to look up and see what's going on at the Fiery from their desks. That would, I think, really enhance its productivity here a great deal.
Oh, and Jams, jams, jams. This seems to happen particularly more with the heavier paper, and it happens a great deal. Luckily the Fiery has a great interface for troubleshooting, and will usually walk even the biggest idiot through to remove a jam and get things going again. Still, it seems to happen a bit more than it should.
Has the Fiery made my life better? On a good day, when it's not too jammed up with other big jobs, sure. I've gotta say I love sending a little 20-page color brochure to print, stopping to say hi to a couple of people on my way to the copy room, and arrive 2 minutes later to find my nice printouts warm and waiting for me. On the other hand, for all the other times I stand in front of it pulling out other people's paper jams, I wonder if the Epson wasn't a little more simple.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
pillowphat
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Member: jessica marjoribanks
Location: Rockford, IL, USA
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
I'm a board game lovin', jujitsu jivin', Cowboy Bebop cravin', book devourin' thirtysomething.
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