Topic Title

Hi all.

Here at the office, we have a vender trying to push a new large format multifunction machine ... a KIP 3000, which is a digital copier, network printer, and scanning system.

Since our current plotter that we have been using for several years (an Hp 1050c) is starting to develope a few problems (but at the moment is still very usable), and our large format copy machine (an old Xerox 2510) is also developing problems, we are considering doing some upgrading ... whether it is to this new (but a bit pricy ... $15,000) machine, or just a replacement plotter and/or copier.

I was asked to see if I could get an idea from some others here on the forum on how a few other firms are handling their plotting, copying, and scanning needs, and possibly even get some alternate recommendations.

Currently, here is how we typically use our equipment...

- BLACK/WHITE CONST DOC printing for in-house use ...... Daily use of our plotter.

- BLACK/WHITE CONST DOC SETS to be printed and sent out ...... Send to a printing service. (The new machine would probably mean in-house printing of these sets).

- COLOR PRINTING for presentations or renderings ...... Occasional in-house printing. (The new machine does not do color, so we would then have to send this out).

- COPY MACHINE ...... Occasional copies, primarily for in-house use.

- SCANNING ...... We now do not do any large format scanning, but THINK we would like to scan-in our vault full of old printed projects.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

We have a kip 4000 and a star print 2080 scanner. I Like it alot. We payed pretty pricey for it used. I am glade we have the service contract, because it does seem to need service every 2 months or so. We have 240,000 ft of the machine now and put close to 1,000 feet a day usually. We have went thru as many as 3 rolls of paper in one day. So our frequent service needs is from high use. We did buy it with alot of feet already on it. But i am happy with it. The only thing I don't like about it is that our older unit is that it runs on NT and they don't offer drivers to switch the internal computer over to 2k or xp. I think the newer ones run on 2k. The print driver takes all print jobs and turn it into a tiff. We change the path it normal paste the file to and use a batch file to copy that so that we have to only print out of dcad once. If we re sell the plans we just have do if from the requester instead of reprintign from dcad. We make our money on selling stock plans, and this saves us lots of time. If you like I can get you a copy of the batch file i wrote to copy files and rename them.