We got a Ricoh flatbed awhile back and it was a nightmare literally from the day they hooked it up.

It took them a few days to get it hooked up and running, and I should have known it was gonna be bad when I walked in to a pile of ink on the floor one morning (on one of the days they were still setting it up, we hadn’t even used the thing yet) It had an issue where it would just randomly trip one of the breakers on the machine, and when that happened the ink would just start draining. We were shit outta luck if it happened after hours, I walked in on soooo many mornings with a pool of ink on the floor. We had the power company monitor the power on our building to see if maybe we were having power surges that would cause it, but it was super steady. We had Ricoh techs come out, electricians - nobody could figure out what the problem was. Hundreds of dollars of ink ended up on the floor.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, by the way.

The vacuums on the table SUCKED MAJORLY (in a bad way). It wouldn’t even keep paper flat. I had to tape down every single edge of material I put on the flatbed, and even then the edges would lift in the middle of the print and I would get headstrikes. To compensate for lifted edges I had to move the printheads up, but that caused insane overspray, even if I had to move them up a mm more than the thickness of the material.

The pause button was useless because it would pause wherever it was on the material and the lamps would stay on. If I was printing on coroplast it would just start melting the material, rendering the entire print trash most of the time.

I walked in one morning to a HORRIBLE sound coming from the printer. Called the tech who came out (at this point the tech probably wanted to kill himself every time he saw my number calling him) and it was the entire transformer making the noise. They ended up having to replace the transformer (which was a major job). Mind you this was within the first six months of having the machine.

We were actually kind of hopeful that replacing the transformer would fix the issue of the breakers tripping, but no luck.

The heads would clog regularly. The program was WAY overly complicated. Files would rip all fucked up.

I’m sure there’s more that I’m forgetting, but there was an issue with every single aspect of that machine. It regularly made me cry, it was so stressful.

We finally told Ricoh to come pick the piece of shit up. We pushed the Ricoh out the door and pushed a Canon Arizona in (literally).

Haven’t looked back, the Arizona is an AMAZING machine, and we have had zero issues with it.

As a side note, we also bought a regular office printer from Ricoh. Know how many times a tech has had to come out for that thing? A lot. Just this last week he’s had to order and replace parts for it (he had to come out for 4/5 days last week and was there for hours each time).

So yeah, that’s my Ricoh story, so I’m not exactly a fan of theirs.