High-Speed Copiers: When Your Office Needs One

You notice a slow copier at the worst moments. A board packet due at noon, a stack of closing documents, the week before school starts. Someone stands by the machine refilling paper while a line forms behind them. That’s usually when people start asking about a faster copier, and it’s worth working out whether speed is really the problem before paying for more of it.

What “high speed” means

Copier speed is rated in pages per minute (ppm), for letter-size pages printed one side at a time. Most of Ricoh’s office copiers are rated between 25 and 60 ppm. The machines people call high-speed start around 60 ppm and run up to about 90 in the office class.

Ricoh’s fastest office models show where the top end sits. The black-and-white IM 9000 is rated at up to 90 pages a minute (Ricoh), and its siblings, the IM 7000 and IM 8000, at 70 and 80. In color, the IM C8010 is rated at 80 pages a minute and the IM C6510 at 65 (Ricoh).

Past that you’re into production presses, which are built for print rooms and print shops rather than offices. We cover those separately in industrial copiers for large-scale printing.

Do the math on your own jobs

Speed is easiest to judge with a job you actually run. Take 50 copies of a 40-page manual: 2,000 pages.

Those are best-case figures. Two-sided printing, stapling, mixed paper and the first page warming up all add time. Even so, the table tells you something useful: going from 30 to 60 saves more than half an hour on that job, and going from 60 to 90 saves eleven minutes.

If your longest regular job is 20 pages, none of this matters much. A faster machine finishes a 20-page job a few seconds sooner. Speed pays off when long jobs are a regular part of the week, or when several people send work to the same machine at once and it’s always busy.

Signs you need more speed

• People wait at the copier most days, not just at month end.
• Jobs queue up behind each other and staff walk back to check if theirs has printed.
• Large jobs get sent out to a print shop because the office machine would be tied up for an hour.
• One copier is doing the work of a department and the meter shows it.

Signs speed isn’t the problem

• The machine spends a lot of its time jammed or waiting for a technician.
• It runs out of paper halfway through long jobs.
• Staff spend more time scanning than printing, and the scanning is slow.
• The real wait is someone stapling, folding or hole-punching by hand.

Each of those has a cheaper fix than a faster engine: a service visit, a bigger paper drawer, a faster document feeder or a finisher.

Going from 30 to 60 saves more than half an hour on that job, and going from 60 to 90 saves eleven minutes.

What to check besides pages per minute

Paper capacity

A fast machine that holds a few hundred sheets stops every few minutes for paper. High-volume models take large paper decks: Ricoh’s IM C6510 and IM C8010 can be set up to hold up to 8,100 sheets (Ricoh brochure). Ask how much paper the machine holds as quoted, not as it could be.

Scanning speed

Many offices scan more than they copy now. The document feeder sets the pace. A single-pass feeder reads both sides of a page at once, and on the fast Ricoh models it scans at up to 240 or 300 images a minute two-sided, according to Ricoh’s specifications. If scanning is your bottleneck, a dedicated document scanner may be the better buy.

Finishing

Stapling, hole-punching, folding and booklet making done by the machine save more time on long jobs than a few extra pages per minute. Make sure the finisher can keep up with the engine and handles the paper sizes you use.

Recommended monthly volume

Manufacturers publish a recommended monthly volume, the page count a model is designed to handle month after month. Ricoh gives up to 50,000 pages a month for the IM C6510 and IM C8010. Compare it with your real page count from the current machine’s meter. Running a machine well above its recommended volume wears it out early; buying one far above your volume means paying for capacity you don’t use.

Power

This one catches people out. The fastest machines can need a different outlet from the one by your current copier. Ricoh’s spec sheets list the IM C6510 on a standard 120-volt supply and the IM C8010 on 208 to 240 volts. The IM 7000 and IM 8000 run on 120 volts but want a 20-amp circuit, and the IM 9000 needs 208 to 240 volts. If you need an electrician, find out before delivery day.

Floor space and weight

High-speed copiers with paper decks and finishers are long, heavy machines. Measure the space, including room to open the doors and pull out drawers, and the path from the loading dock.

One fast machine or two moderate ones

Sometimes the better answer isn’t a faster copier. Two machines at 45 ppm in different parts of the office can serve people better than one at 90 at the end of the hall: shorter walks, no single queue, and work carries on when one is down for service. The single fast machine wins when big jobs are the norm and need finishing that only the larger models offer.

How we size it

We start from your meter readings and your longest regular jobs, not the brochure. Our copier and multifunction printer team looks at speed, paper capacity, finishing, scanning and where the machine has to go, and tells you if a smaller machine or two would do the job better. You can compare the fast Ricoh models yourself in the Smart Configurator, starting with the IM 7000, IM 8000 and IM 9000 and the IM C6510 and IM C8010. For what affects the price, read how much a copy machine costs.