Art Post
It’s been a long time since Ricoh launched a new generation of A3 color multifunction devices—I’m thinking four years or so. A short time ago Ricoh launched their new iStyle design. The series consists of the MPC 3002 (32 color ppm, the MPC3502 (35 color ppm) and then the 4002 (42 color ppm) and the MPC 4502 (45 color ppm). Today, I’m going to focus on what’s cool and different from the previous color A3 models. (BTW, I love the new features, the new colors and the ease of use with this system.)
100 Sheet Single Pass Duplex Scanning Document Feeder – Only available on the “A” series, this document feeder scans both side of a duplex original of up to 116 images per minute (ipm) in color and black documents. What’s equally as impressive is the simplex original of 85 ipm for color and black documents. This is awesome for heavy scanning applications for the mortgage, title, law and health care markets.
iStyle GUI – The new slick iStyle graphical user interface is icon driven with presets for copy, scan, print, fax, document server (Did you know that you can store documents on the hard drive in a post-ripped state and re-print them at any time? Even better you can populate the hard drive with popular documents such as forms, mailers, and brochures, thus saving yourself incredible amounts of time locating the documents or printing them for other people in your company. Plus you’re driving prints to the lower cost MFP instead of the higher cost color printer.), and the ability to add short cuts to programs (embedded solutions) and Web pages. If you’ve been holding back on the UDOCX Cloud solution, wait no longer, we can now process documents to the cloud.
Scheduled Print – What’s been the problem with hold print, locked print, etc.? Most people don’t want to walk to the MFP and wait for the documents to print. The longer I spend at the MFP the longer I have to process additional work, or even, dare I say take a break. Scheduled Print allows you to select the time for the MFP to print your documents, thus no waiting at the system. Just make sure you synchronize your time with the internal MFP clock. Since most manufacturers did away with the manual mail box tray (that means the printer of copier had additional bins that could be programmed for each user), this is an awesome feature that promotes enhanced productivity.
Print from USB or SD Card – Dig this, located on the side of the new iStyle GUI is a USB flash port and SD Card Slot. Some will ask “Why do I need this?” Security, plain and simple. Do you really want a non-authorized device plugging in or wireless accessing your network in order to print a few silly documents? Have them copy the file to USB or SD plug it into the slots and rest assured that they’ll see their list of files and print in a secure way. Want something even better? Users can touch a preview button after selecting the stored file and to preview the image or document on the iStyle GUI prior to printing. So much for wasting paper, right?
Banner Page Print – This is not to be confused with printing a 12×60 color banner for marketing. The Banner Page Print (they could have given it a better name) function is used to separate network print jobs and also acts as a separator page between print jobs. The banner page has everything you need to know about that print job such as log-in user name, user ID or the Windows/MAC account name, the time and date the document is printed along with the computer name and title of the job. Now we can identify those people that leave their print jobs at the MFP.
Scan2PDF/A – No software, no problem; there’s a setting within the scanner utility that allows the user to select PDF/A scanning. For those who don’t know, PDF/A is a file format and ISO standard for long-term archival of electronic documents. PDF/A can be used in critical scanning applications relating to quality management, regulatory compliance or when PDF/A documents are required by Government Agencies.
Fax – It ain’t dead yet! Although faxing is not used as often as it once was, fax still plays an important part of redundancy within organizations. How do you get or receive a document if the Internet, or mail server is down? You pretty much don’t unless you have a fax machine or a fax module on an MFP. Traditionally, if you needed six MFP’s to copy, print, scan and fax you would need all six to have print, scan, and fax options. No more. With this new technology you’ll only have to buy one fax option—a fax connection unit type A and then all of the systems will be able to piggyback fax from the main (master) system that has the fax option. Talk about saving money!
There’s so much more to this new system from Ricoh, I’ll post a follow up in a few days with some of the additional features like ECO view, Quota’s, and Split Scan. Stay tuned.
Good selling.
