Ricoh Cut-Sheet Printers | Sheet-Fed Printing

Cut-sheet printers, also known as sheet-fed printers or cut-sheet presses, are large-volume Production Printing Machines that produce high-quality documents and materials, such as brochures, flyers, billing statements, employee earnings statements, forms, and posters. The design of these printers supports commercial print environments, print shops, or in-house printing departments. These printers typically produce around 1 million pages per month to meet the demands of high-volume printing.

Best Digital Cut-Sheet Printers

• Ricoh Pro Series
• Kyocera TASKalfa
• Sharp MX
• Canon imagePress
• HP Indigo
• Xerox iGen
• Heidelberg Versafire

Why Businesses Need Sheet-Fed Printers

What are businesses looking for in a cut-sheet printer? Enterprises purchasing sheet-fed printers for in-house operations indicate that there are three must haves that these devices need to meet. They need high volume, fast printing, and high quality. These three items are the first specs that they look at and want to see before going on to the other specifications. Print shops, however, have a much longer list of needs, many of which are in the features and benefits section and later in the advantages section below.

Top 3 Business Needs for Cut Sheet Printers

1. Print large volumes
2. Print with high resolution
3. Fast printing

Top 10 Features and Benefits of Cut-Sheet Printers

#1  High Print Volume

The design of sheet-fed printers is to handle large printing jobs, making them ideal for businesses that need to produce a lot of materials. Digital printers fill the gap between standard office printers with a 50,000 monthly print volume and offset presses with a monthly volume in the millions. Most offset presses are not cost-effective at production runs of less than 2,000. Production printers, however, are cost-effective to produce a single page run or up to 1.75 million pages monthly. These devices accommodate small and large print runs for print shops and companies that operate in-house printing.

#2  High-Quality Printing

These printers produce high-quality, professional-looking documents, with crisp text, sharp colors, and fine details. The print resolution of these devices starts at 600 DPI. Most sheet-fed printers have a high DPI capability, which means they can produce small details with clarity and precision. Printers achieving 300 DPI are high-res printers. Printers with 600 to 1200 DPI are ultra-high-res printers, while 2400 to 4800 DPI are extreme-high-res. High-resolution graphics are often a significant concern for companies with high branding expectations. This type of printer has the capacity for high resolutions that branded companies often demand.

High-resolution sheet-fed printers produce high-quality, detailed printed materials in black & white or color with high resolutions of up to 2400 x 4800 dots per inch (DPI). An example of a 2400 x 4800 resolution printer is the Ricoh Pro C9210. The higher the DPI, the greater the clarity and crispness of the image or lettering. A graphic document printed with 300 DPI will appear fine for most people. Executives would expect 600 DPI. Photographers and graphic artists require 1200 DPI and above.

What Constitutes High Print Quality?

• Consistent density
• Uniform toner coverage
• Good color reproduction
• Dot sharpness
• Spot on color registration
• Gloss without deviations¹

#3  High Print Speed

Commercial sheet-fed printers produce large numbers of pages in a short amount of time, helping businesses to meet tight deadlines. These devices operate at high speeds, completing a large volume of printing in a short amount of time. Pages per minute (PPM) volumes begin at 65 and go up to 136. Faster print times reduce the wait time for staff members and get projects completed faster to save businesses money.

#4  Versatile Media Handling

Many cut-sheet digital printers can handle a wide range of paper, card stock, and other media types, including glossy, matte, metallic foils, and coated stocks. The thickness of the substrate and the surface characteristics play a significant role in print quality and the look and feel of marketing materials or sales collateral. Office printers often jam when attempting to print on anything that is not standard paper.

#5  Advanced Finishing Options

Many models have options for advanced finishing, such as booklet-making, stapling, and folding. These advanced features provide a complete printing solution. Finishing options can accommodate company annual reports, tri-folded self-mailers, branded marketing folders, and many other marketing materials.² Other specialty finishes include coatings of varnish, aqueous, gloss, matte, soft touch, dull, textured, glitter, overall and spot. There are alot of choices to produce many different effects.

#6  Variable Data Printing (VDP)

Production printers are digital, allowing a business to customize a multi-page brochure for a targeted marketing audience or a custom-built flyer for a specific individual. VDP is a digital printing technology that allows for the personalization of each printed piece within a single print run. This allows changing the customer’s name, address, individual message, images, logo, or other items from page to page. VDP works without stopping or delaying publishing, it prints sheet to sheet digitally. Digital integration with a customer or employee database facilitates printing personalized direct mail for each household or printing individual earnings statements or end-of-year tax documents for employees.

#7  Print on Demand

Digital (dgt) printers allow businesses to print whatever document they have stored on a computer, including fine art or a complex marketing piece. Any computer with access to the printer can produce the printout. Some cut-sheet printers, like the Ricoh Pro C5310s, C7200SX, or the C8320s are multifunction printers that can print, copy, and scan. These devices allow a business to scan and digitize an existing document for revision or copy direct without edits. Some can also reproduce existing documents with excellent matching colors and tones.

Dgt printing adds several advantages to print shops or in-house printing departments. It provides an expanded assortment of printing products, including the list below.

• Promotional – direct mail, brochures, trifolds, and door hangers
• Commercial – short print runs of anything with fast turnarounds
• Publishing – maps, newsletters, reports, and books-on-demand
• Business – billing, account statements, manuals, and forms³

#8  Quick Turnaround Time

Businesses can print immediately to their in-house sheet-fed printer or send a digital file remotely to a print shop. The print shop can complete the print and often deliver the product to the business within a few hours. Offset presses usually require at least a week to complete most projects.

#9  Cost-Effective

Many print shops have a production printer in addition to their offset press to accommodate short-run needs. They use an offset press for long runs and a cut-sheet printer for short runs. Sheet-fed printers can be more cost-effective for businesses that need to produce large quantities of materials but fall short of the economy of a offset press. Short-run printing is less expensive on these types of printers.

#10  Fifth Color

Adding a 5th color offers an increased color gamut, more vibrant color options, and helps to make marketing materials stand out. Most color printers offer four color printing (cyan, yellow, magenta, and black – CYMK). Adding a neon or metallic to a print project takes the print job to another level, surpassing most printed products on the market. The following list of 5th color toners adds significant pop to marketing materials and provides additional characteristics to the printed product.

• Gold
• Silver
• Neon Pink
• Neon Yellow
• White
• Clear
• Invisible Red

Adding an invisible ink on a security card is unseen by the naked eye but not to a security scanner. The use of an invisible color provides an additional level of security for access cards not commonly found in most access surveillance systems.

Blending CMYK with neon pink or yellow can create vibrant hues and reproduce brand colors that match company color schemes. The application of white ink creates special effects. Adding metallic toners to bring out glitter and shine is another possibility. Adding a color management system to these dtg printers with enhanced color inks, expands color palettes to produce 250 metallic colors and an almost endless color wheel of choices. Some cut-sheet machines offer a fifth color toner capability like the three listed below:

List of 5th Color Cut-Sheet Printers for Graphic Printing

1. Ricoh Pro C7200X
2. Ricoh Pro C7200XM
3. Ricoh Pro C7210X

Printed Products

Sheet-fed printers produce a lot of different products for business operations and marketing. Below are typical commercial print products arranged by category.

List of Cut-Sheet Printer Products

Types of Cut-Sheet Printers

These commercial printers are all digital and come in color and B&W models. Printing can take place by ink jet or laser. Below is a summary of the most common types.

• Black and White Only - provides fast production of business documents
• Black & White and Color - offers greater versitility for business and marketing projects
• Color Graphic Arts - designed for high resolution graphics for vibrant colors, clarity, and crisp text
• Ink Jet - sprays ink to subtrates
• Laser Toner - utilizes electroplate technology to transfer colored powder toner to subtrates
• Print or Multifunction - multifunction adds copy and scan to a printer's function.
• Light or Heavy Production - refers to the volume of printing completed during a monthly peroid. Production can be light (<500,000 monthly), to mid (500,000 to <=1 million monthly) to high (>1 million monthly).

Choosing the Best Cut-Sheet Printer – Product Selection Continuum

The product selection chart above displays sheet-fed printers along a continuum with light production models to the left and the heavy production models on the right. Prices for the high-volume models tend to be higher than the low production models. The first row under the continuum displays the color models while the B&W only models are in the second row. Additional rows display the max monthly volume for each machine, production speeds, resolution quality, and whether the models have 5th ink capabilities. Note that each model that offers multifunction capabilities of print, copy, and scan are indicated in red type.

Ricoh Cut-Sheet Printer Specifications Comparison Chart

Top 10 Best Cut Sheet Printer Advantages

#1  Consistency and Accuracy

The design of modern sheet-fed printers produces consistent and accurate results, which helps to ensure that business materials look professional and are free from errors.

#2  Versatility

Many sheet-fed printers can handle a wide range of paper stocks, sizes, and weights, making them suitable for diverse printing applications. Print colorful packaging, tri-fold mailers, door hangers, and reports.

#3  Automation

Sheet-fed digital printers have automated features that can help streamline the printing process, reducing the need for manual intervention. Digital automation makes setup easy and more accurate. This automation gives printing operators more time for additional projects to earn more income.

#4  Fiery Raster Image Processor (RIP)

Complete soft proofs with the actual CMYK values. Edit individual CMYK response curves. Fiery allows viewing a composite of all halftone separations at the dot level. Adjust initial setup, calibration, ink limiting, total area coverage, and light ink mixing. Digital adjustments are far easier to make than manual alterations and provide spot-on color and superior halftone resolutions.⁴

#5  Late Binding Changes

Digital print provides the opportunity to integrate last-minute changes to documents ready for print. A key employee may leave the company at the last moment. A new technology breakthrough changes the way you will move forward as a company. A product replacement is ready for distribution. These formerly difficult changes are now easy to update within a digital printing system.

#6  Economy of Scale

Obtain more control over your branding and when projects finish by adding production printing to your in-house services. Short print runs completed in-house can save businesses money and offer a quick turnaround time. Companies and non-profit organizations that do their own short-run printing suddenly find all kinds of new projects they can complete within their own organization, impossible before. Greater control, increased cost-effectiveness, and new capabilities combine to scale your business to new expanding heights.

#7  Advanced Print Heads

Some sheet-fed printers use advanced print heads with multiple ink nozzles. These devices can lay down more ink with each pass, resulting in higher resolution, finer details, and faster printing. Some commercial-grade cut-sheet printers like the Ricoh Pro C72 come with printheads with enhanced durability for longer life and extended warranties.

#8  Advanced Color Management

Some sheet-fed printers have advanced color management systems that enable precise color reproduction and consistency, even when printing at high speeds. With offset presses, color management is painstakingly manually adjusted, while cut-sheet printers auto-adjust color management electronically. Again, less time results in more capacity for printshops.

When cyan, yellow, magenta, and black combine on a surface, they form text, graphics, and pictures. These colors drop onto paper or another substrate to form tiny spots. The proximity and arrangement of the colored dots on the substrate provide an almost endless number of colors that can display. The tighter and smaller the colored dots, the higher the resolution and the better the quality.

#9  High-quality Inks

High-quality inks, such as pigment-based inks, can produce sharp, vibrant colors with good fade resistance, making them well-suited for high-resolution printing. Pigment inks have microscopic solid color specs suspended in a liquid. The HP DesignJet HD Pro MFP uses an aqueous pigment ink.

Laser or electrophotography printers utilize toners that consist of colored, fine powder. Toner is more expensive than most liquid-based inks but last significantly longer. All Ricoh Pro Series cut-sheet printers use advanced dry toners.

#10  Advanced Substrates

Print quality results from 3 things--print technique, print resolution, and the character of the substrate. The substrate is the base material or surface that accepts the ink. Paper is the most common substrate. Substrate materials suitable for sheet-fed printing have measurements in grams per square meter (GSM). The common expression of a substrate’s GSM is the weight of the material; for instance, a 20-pound paper has a GSM of 75 while a 32-pound paper has a 120 GSM.

Most advanced cut-sheet printers can handle the density of advanced substrates. Thick materials for packaging, durable outside signage, or premium marketing materials require printers with high tolerances for heavy media. A robust cut-sheet printer should be able to handle substrates with a significant range of thick and thin materials. Each Ricoh sheet-fed printer has a GSM range of 52 to 360, accommodating a vast selection of substrate materials.

What These Benefits and Advantages Mean for Your Business

Commercial publishers can grow their print volume by adding short-run print jobs completed by digital cut-sheet printers. Print stores can add additional services like oversized applications that cut-sheet printers accommodate. A printing workshop can satisfy more client requests and expand its customer base with a broader selection and variety of printable substrates, including specialty papers and card stocks. Print shops can produce elaborate pocket folders, eye-catching posters, bound and finished book wraps, folded panel mailers, tri-fold brochures, and more. A Ricoh cut-sheet printer in your shop facilitates printing on coated sheets up to 13 × 27.5 inches or uncoated up to 13 × 49.6 inches to capture more business. Is it time to add the advantages of a modern digital sheet-fed printer to your fleet?

Digital print-on-demand or sheet-fed printing is the trend for modern print shops and in-house printing. Digital presses provide for smaller runs and personalization that offset presses are not economically equipped to handle. Print shops can save time, reduce waste, take less setup time, and produce quality print jobs to meet the service-on-demand that many businesses today require.⁵ For many shops, time is of the essence and always in short supply. Instead of always depending upon a time-consuming press, printers can shift many smaller projects to a cut-sheet printer. Print shops that print POP displays, outdoor signage, banners, backlit displays, and other large marketing pieces may also need to consider adding a Wide Format Printer to their aresenal.

Footnotes

• ¹Lamperth, Ingvar. "Paper and Digital Printing-What is Happening?" Proceedings of the DPP2001 International Conference on Digital Production Printing and Industrial Applications, Antwerp, Belgium. Vol. 331. (2001): 333. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023. www.imaging.org/site/PDFS/Papers/2001/DPP-0-252/4680.pdf
• ²Ricoh purchased Quadient and thereby added advanced print-finishing technologies to its printers. The Seybold Report; Gilbertsville Vol. 22, Iss. 12, (Jun 27, 2022): 7. Accessed 1 Feb. 2023. www.proquest.com/openview/0f844ca166cd9df46173c0645aa863b1/1
• ³Lamperth, 334.
• ⁴Sharma, Abhay, and John Seymour. "Evaluation of expanded gamut software solutions for spot color reproduction." Color Research & Application 45.2 (2020): 315-324. Abstract Accessed 6 February 2023. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/col.22471
• ⁵Lamperth, 334.