If it’s been awhile since you looked into getting a copier for the office, you’re in for a huge surprise.
We’ve all seen the multifunction centres that copy, scan, fax etc. Imagine all those features — plus every possible variation thereof, writ extremely large, amped up to professional (ie design studio, copy shop) quality, all done the fastest you’ve ever seen, and you’re still not even close.
Saying you can scan from the Bizhub C450, fax from it, copy and print from it is like saying you can knock over a toolshed with a nuclear blast.
Don’t sit there waiting for a scan like you have to with a flatbed scanner; put it in the sheet feeder and it sucks it in and spits it out as fast as it does a photocopy (at a resolution up to 600dpi). There it is on your desktop as a PDF, .tif or .jpg. or you can set the unit to automatically email or fax it to anyone out of the onboard address book.
Print your letterhead in electronic format (or scan your hard copy letterhead at high resolution), and there it stays in the onboard system as a template. Just print your mail merged letters onto it and never pay for stationery printing again.
The copying options are dizzying, and if you attach the finisher you add the option to scan or print documents straight to your favourite way of collating or sorting them, even in stapled or folded book form. It takes paper up to 256 grams of any size and description, adjusting for the output depending on your paper stock as you go.
The key to the speed is the onboard 40Gb hard disk. All ripping (image processing) is done in the innards of the printer itself, not your clunky old PC or inadequate network connections.
And besides speed, the real advantage in having the Bizhub C450 — which you’ll come to realise even more the more you use it — is that it replaces so many of the disparate machines, processes and tasks you need now.
It’s just as at home among a handful of people as it is in a large company (or a collection of them), with an array of output security and permissions settings, all based at the system display or from the administrator’s desktop controls.
The display can be a lot to digest, but you may not even do most of the driving from the machine itself. Aside from the space it takes up on the floor (admittedly more than a desktop printer), it integrates seamlessly to your network and you’ll hardly know it’s there. Particularly since it replaces your copier, scanner, fax, printer, guillotine and stapler in most cases.
It’s ironic that a paper based tool takes us the closest to a paperless office we’ve ever been, but the Bizhub is very much the future of the convergence and performance of office tools.