Behemoth printer is practically a wall
The Canon ImagePress C6000 is one honkin' huge printer-bindery device, a demonic cluster of moving parts and toner that constitutes an entire wall of electronics. I used to work in pre-press and have spent more hours than I can count with my head in the guts of various ancestors of this rough beast, and I purely do love them -- something about being able to go from ctrl-p to holding a book in your hands while your head swims from the hot baked smell of the fuser... At €114K, I'm not going to be buying one any time soon, but man, that looks like a sweet piece of printer.
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Fed-up with printers unable to keep-up with your speed and creativity? Just for you and your HUGE office, the Canon ImagePRESS C6000. It prints up to 60 high quality A4 photo pages per minute! Under this monster's hood you'll find a small computer powered by a 800MHz CPU, 1.5GB of RAM, 80GB of HDD in RAID 1, as well as a 10.4” LCD. The print resolution of this insane printer, the C6000 is obviously oriented to professional usage, is 1200x1200dpi.If you're looking to purchase the ImagePRESS C6000 you’d better ensure you have at least 9m long of free space (9.936x1.135x1.475mm), and be prepared to spend over 114000 EUR. Without the printer server.
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I guess you could say I bought the opposite end of Canon's line - their cheapest model personal econo-printer, twenty five years ago. It still prints flawlessly although the fatigue in the plastic from the cover opening and closing now makes the cover a little inconvenient because you can no longer tilt it back.
I can't think of a product where I got more of my money's worth.
Paul - originalfaith.com
Well Paul you lucked out, when econo printers were not necessarily the swear word they are today. :(
And on topic, mmm all those finely design trays and doors.
Cheap considering what it can do.
"...and be prepared to spend over 114000 EUR. Without the printer server."
Damn! This is EXACTLY what I need. And I mean EXACTLY. Except for that last bit. No printer server = no sale.
As long as you're geeking out on printers, you should check out the Xerox iGen 3. It has half the resolution of that Canon but prints much quicker and definitely has a more imposing footprint. It stands about 9 feet tall in places and houses multiple A/C units.
...I look at that thing, and I have waking nightmares of tracking down a paper jam.
My father actually works on printers like those. The printer itself may be large, but most of them need an entire other unit just to keep them cool. The air conditioning unit may be just as big as the printer itself.
Not so bad. I imagine that a large book-seller could use this for a POD online business. For instance, if Cory Doctorow wanted to make a limited edition print of Down and Out available, but with some color illustrations, on acid-free rag, it could be done without any trouble. It might cost what the average hardback costs, but the writer would receive a larger cut. I wonder how a Doctorow POD book would do? Hey, Mr. D, write a book and publish it with just POD, no bookstore middleman. No shelf space to buy, except on a virtual shelf in a VR bookstore.
"Finally, our awesome C6000 is assembled, installed, and online! Press print!"
"PC LOAD LETTER"
You can get one-generation-back hardware like this for astoundingly low prices. They're pretty much all leased, so once the lease is up the original user just says "pick it up" to the leasing company. The leasing company made all their money over the lease, so they liquidate them. I've bought all the printers for my office through lease returns, and they've all been amazing hardware and incredible deals. 1200dpi 50ppm beasts with scan-to-email-PDF, 2000 page feeders, staplers, etc, for anywhere from $250 to $500. Original cost? $15,000 to $20,000. I've seen printers the Canon's size (most of them were Canon or Xerox) sell for $2,000 to $5,000, perfectly functional, only two to three years old. If I had even the slightest need for one, I would have bought it. But it would be like the average person suddenly owning a jumbo jet: what do you do with it?
I guess my point is, if you wanted to try your hand at this sort of thing and had space and patience, you could get one for a song.
In high school I spent a summer working in the office and we had a mega copier/binder that was 30' feet long. It was ridiculously complicated to use, but it could spit out dozens of copies of 100 page bound booklets like a gunslinger.
That... is... huge.
On the subject, an old job had some "higher ups" who figured out that instead of purchasing new inkjet cartridges, it was cheaper to purchase a brand new printer (a very cheap one, albeit) that came with the cartridges and then turn around and sell the printer online for dirt cheap.
I wish I could find better pictures, but HP's Scitex division makes wide-format printers that share the same design features as consumer inkjet printers.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/ga/WF25a/18972-18972-3328065-2511410-3461973-2512047.html
Those printers are SIX FEET TALL. It's really bizarre to see one- like someone pointed a grow-ray at your Mom's inkjet.
I've got the space if you've got the hundred grand.
not a bad price if you have the space and want to open your own publishing house.
http://www.photocommunications.com/images/equipment/HP_Scitex_XL1500_lg.jpg
Any idea how long from Power Off to print an address on an envelope?
Rstevens: if I was someone like C.Doctorow and I thought enough people would buy my new book by reading about it on this blog (estimated viewing is about 7 million per month), and I thought I could sell 50,000 books to that seven million for $20 US dollars (less than a bookstore), I would spend the 100k. 50,000 x 10($10 goes to production and mail cost)= $500,000. Deduct 150k (machine and service and site rental)and that leaves you with a 350,000 profit. Minus 150k for taxes and that leaves you with 200,000. A new adult novel with a great cover and some sample pages to read might help sell enough books to make back the investement within a few months. It could happen.
The deal with buying used lease printers is that you usually don't get the maintenance contract. Given the number of moving parts this thing has, that's just begging for trouble, unless you really, really love fixing printers.
The problem with a PoD-only book is that there's an enormous amount of work that my publisher does that isn't just arranging for the book to be printed (indeed, I used to work in prepress -- if that's all Tor did, I could fire them and up my royalty rate by 800%).
What Tor does is edit, publicize, and deploy an army of trained sales people to retail outlets across the country to personally talk up my books to buyers for chains and indies. Not only do I lack the time to do that -- I just *can't* do that. I'm not a salesman, and if I was, I couldn't possibly cover the ground that Tor's seasoned, expert reps cover every day.
I assume this sort of device is designed for high volume, round-the-clock industrial printing. But imagine a version of this kind of device that was designed instead for lower volume, but low latency and could print a full book on demand.
Such a device could be the future of book stores and libraries.
A library with something like this would be amazing. It could print anything in the public domain at will. You wouldn't even have to bring back the copy, since libraries wouldn't be physical book repositories.
And instead of mostly stocking best-sellers, bookstores could truly stock the "long tail" and compete with Amazon, printing whatever the rights-owners were willing to license.
Cory said,"I just *can't* do that. I'm not a salesman, and if I was, I couldn't possibly cover the ground that Tor's seasoned, expert reps cover every day."
I'm having an Out of Context moment. Cory, I'm going to politely disagree with you. You are a very good salesperson. Perhaps you are being appropriately modest. And I understand the foot soldier concept pushing your stuff. But isn't that what you do, to some extent, on your own? You self-promote every time you comment on something. Your talent as a writer is not limited to your books (obviously). Every time you write an opinion you are selling yourself to a group of fans that have been influenced by your work. And if the Boing Boing numbers are correct, and there are millions passing through here each month, then you are in effect your own best promotor, because all those people from Tor are not accomplishing in ten years (exposure to individuals)what you do in a day.
Editing wouldn't be problem because there are great genre editors that work independent of the houses. They earn their money. And keeping the machine up and running is not all that difficult. Just keep the basic parts on hand. Doctorow is becoming a name Brand, and Doctorow Publishing could be a nice game for just one book. It just sounds like it could be a good investment to me.
I would buy a Doctorow book from a Doctorow POD publishing house and I'm not --that-- odd. The numbers are fairly easy to estimate.
I must say that €114k looks like a bargain for a machine like this. The wet-process machine my photo printing lab uses costs more than that and doesn't look half as impressive, but I'll admit I'm comparing apples and aardvarks here.
It also reminds me of the Xerox we had in high school. One of the first high volume photocopiers, did an estimated 120ppm, and it was huge - though not *that* huge - and really noisy. It had a room of its own, being in there for five minutes you'd carry the ozone smell with you for the rest of the day.
#20: I remember reading a SF novel, can't remember the title, it was quite a few years ago, in which any book was simply printed on demand...
If that doesn't play Powerhouse while it prints, it's not worth it.
Comparing a web press to a printer isn't really fair, but I'm going to do it anways. I've had to deal with a printer at work that's capable of somewhere around 10,000 (dual-sided- so 20,000 printed) ppm.
It's mindblowing to watch this thing. It's got two full sets of plates, and you can change one set of plates out on the fly. So when you need to change the book you're printing, there's no need to stop the web- just load in the new ones, deal with 10 seconds of "waste" (1500+ pages!!!) and there you go.
Aside from a lot of continual tweaking and monitoring, the biggest piece of manual intervention is getting a new roll of paper, marking up the seam and fresh edges, and getting it near the machine. The press will automatically put it into position, run it through the web, and keep on printing. From there, the paper goes through the plates, the web is cut into ribbons, and then folded, cut, and collected into signatures. The machine even neatly stacks the signatures on a pressboard backing and then straps the whole assembly tight so it can be taken off to the binding area.
Once you deal with this thing, going into the rooms full of iGens is a lot less impressive. :)
I also think the Timsons Presses cost a bit more than 120k Euros.