Ricoh has announced its newest continuous feed platform, the Ricoh Pro VC60000, which it says marks a milestone in the evolution of its production print inkjet portfolio.
The company says the new system, coupled with its software offerings, enables a more rapid shift from offset to digital as commercial printers focus on data-driven applications and workflows requiring high performance colour inkjet presses with vibrant print quality and increased media flexibility. The Ricoh Pro VC60000 can produce more than 100,000 A4 images per hour. It provides a function-rich total solution for customers new to digital colour, and for those wanting to consolidate and streamline their operations.
The Ricoh Pro VC60000 uses Ricoh’s next generation drop-on-demand print heads and high density pigment inks, developed from 25 years of experience in developing core inkjet technologies. These new print heads are capable of physical resolutions up to 1200 by 1200dpi. Ricoh says that, using the Ricoh Pro VC60000 s dynamic variable drop technology, customers can produce near-offset quality documents. Commercial printers can run, with the optional undercoat unit, a variety of offset coated gloss stocks with output quality comparable to what they expect from offset devices, according to Ricoh. An optional inline protector-coating unit provides scratch and scuff resistance to protect critical documents.
Ricoh believes the Ricoh Pro VC60000 will help the offset printing community become more efficient, saying that its print quality will provide customers with the ability to shift jobs to digital that haven t been profitable on offset. The company says it will help commercial printers, in-plants and print service providers to compress run lengths and operate more cost-effectively, while maintaining high quality at a throughput that wasn’t viable until today.
Mark Burgess, production print manager for Ricoh New Zealand, says that, with more than 70 billion impressions to date, Ricoh’s InfoPrint 5000 family, the first continuous feed drop-on-demand inkjet solution for high-volume production, has led the market for six years running. He says, “Ricoh inkjet machines dominate the transactional market place and have enjoyed some success in the commercial print market place as well. With the quality and substrate capability of the Ricoh Pro VC60000 we are now able to provide a high performance digital solution to the commercial print market that will enable printers to meet the demands of a modern market and streamline workflow significantly.”
Based on open standard architectures, the Ricoh Pro VC60000 uses a new Ricoh digital front end (DFE) that provides native support for PDF and PDF/VT together with JDF and advanced colour management support. Ricoh says this high performance DFE is optimised for complex data-driven graphic communications, and provides an easy-to-use operator interface and advanced workflow management, leveraging Ricoh’s extensive experience in mission-critical variable data processing. Ricoh says its software, solutions, and strategic partner offerings complement the Ricoh Pro VC60000 and include an unrivalled suite of tools and utilities that give customers several options to increase their efficiency and productivity.
With its modular architecture, the Ricoh Pro VC60000 supports a variety of configuration options to give customers the flexibility to meet their needs. It says the new platform is highly scalable and has been designed with future enhancements and field upgrades in mind to protect customers’ investments in hardware, software, and infrastructure as their business grows and requirements change.
