Riso Pros and Cons

I used to make my living here. First of all, over the last several years, we have seen a deterioration with Riso in support, inventory (especially parts) and innovation. Their attempts to reinvent themselves have not been successful. We have jumped ship and do the Ricoh PriPorts now.

As far as the industry category of the Digital Duplicator is concerned, the niche is now so small that it hardly merits mention unless you feel that our industry is going the way of specialty.

The niche now usually involves a specialty application on a media that doesn't do well (if at all) on a laser device. For instance, multiple part forms if you find someone still using those. You might still find the need to run 1-5K envelopes which is too much to try to do on most $10K or cheaper machines and too few to get the price breaks from internet suppliers, especially if they want external messages that change regularly. I'm not talking about variable data. That's a whole different discussion (despite Rico's attempts to do even that with add on accessories).

Obviously, long-run spot color is still way too expensive on a laser device compared to a digital duplicator if you are OK with the quality.

Awesome stuff, does any of this apply to Riso's inkjet ComColor MFPs, or are you specifically refering to Riso's Duplicators.

Would love to hear your (and everyone's) take on their inkjet MFPs...

Thanks,

Jake

The ComColor was one of the attempts to reinvent themselves that I elluded to earlier. I never saw the ComColor as a viable option anywhere. The acceptable media too restrictive and the quality too washed out. Might be OK for pastels but anything dark didn't look acceptable to me. Therefore, I never sold one so understand that I don't have any personal end user experience with it.

Jake:

Duplicators are pretty much dead at least here in the North East, I would tend to think that the Bible Belt does much better with sales.

Comcolor!  Could never sell one, even though we demonstrated a few.  I call it the ink technology "newspaper color".  Best image is still on inkjet (rice paper), however, the cost of that paper is way to high to consider in the production market.

We had a prospect that loved it for newsletters, however the first gen had too much ink bleed through on 18lb bond paper. They had to use lighter weight paper to keep the mailing cost down.  Never got that sale.

Pitney Bowes is really the only viable channel for the Comcolor, the system is perfect for producing mailers with using pressure seal paper.  I have a funny story to tell about that, but not here.

We even had a demo in a large insurance company, they loved everything about the system, were going to use it for envelopes, however, we could not get the color of their logo to match on the output, thus the system was not approved.

I've heard that the 3rd gen was better with bleed through on lighter stocks, but we never committed to the 3rd gen since we couldn't get rid of the @nd gen systems.

If they could only bring the price down, and get some better color matching software.  Hope this helps

You are correct about the bible belt. In North and SC we cover about 15 counties or so and one county in particular is full of duplicators especially in the rural churches. When we go and talk to them about a demo of an MFP the typically respond with something like "We have this new technology called a riso." I bet I have heard that 50 times from a church. They truly believe the duplicator is the greatest thing our industry came out with last year.

Other than that they are pretty much dead in our market.