fpt@wgi70.UUCP (07/20/83)
This is a desperate call for help. This is a regular underdog vs. city hall type situation. We are being backed into a corner by (you guessed it!) IBM. Our main product line is laser printer output. Think of it as industrial strength word processing. If you wanted to send 50,000 personalized letters you might come to us. We have been generating these letters using a device known as a 6670. The main qualities of this machine are: 1. Image quality. When the machine is right, you can't beat the output. The machine is right very seldom. 2. Speed. Depending on how much text is being printed per sheet, a 6670 will produce between 500 and 2000 sheets per hour. We are desperate! IBM cannot keep these machines running (we have two). Apparently there is an unwritten rule that you should not run more than 20,000 sheets per month. We often produce 20,000 per day. They are threatening to force us to do our own maintenance because our down time is so high and we are costing them so much. The price of parts could ruin us. The bottom line: What can we replace these machines with? Fifty daisy-wheel printers? A Xerox 9700? (poor quality, half million price tag. Rumor has it that they too have reliability problems. A 6670 runs about $48,000.) Ten smaller (and slower) laser printers? We need (of course) image quality, speed, reliability. If you have a suggestion, let us hear from you. Fred Toth Washburn Graphics P.O. Box 31517 Charlotte, NC 28231 decvax!duke!mcnc!unc-c!wgi70!fpt