Announced at Hunkeler Innovation Days, Lucerne (20-23 February), the machine is mainly targeted at the transactional and direct mail markets.
It will be available for purchase in Q4 2017 and will begin beta testing around three to four months prior, probably in Europe.
Ricoh production printing vice-president Benoit Chatelard said pricing had not yet been set but that it would sit somewhere between its IP5000 and its 2014-launched flagship VC60000, which is also on its Hunkeler stand.
Speaking to PrintWeek at Hunkeler, Chatelard said: “We have one very robust established machine, the IP5000 for transactional and some direct marketing and now a very innovative machine, the 40000, for direct marketing and some graphic arts, while the flagship VC60000 does the most extreme jobs."
The VC40000 runs at 120m/min, meaning it is capable of producing more than 100,000 A4 images per hour. It runs at full 600dpi resolution and supports a variety of stocks, ranging from 40gsm to 250gsm.
It uses Ricoh’s multiple-drop technology, three sizes of drop for any pixel, which Chatelard said give the printer a perceived resolution of 1,200dpi. Like the VC60000, the machine has CMY printhead parking, meaning users can selectively engage the printheads to run in colour or mono applications.
“The people ask for quality and so even when you do transpromo or books the expectation of the market is not to trade off on quality, so I think 600x600dpi is a minimum standard,” added Chatelard.
“I think the concept of parking is great, having this flexibility so you can serve mono and not be tied in with the whole process, particularly when you have smaller customers.”
The VC40000 is also integrated with Ricoh’s ProcessDirector, providing transactional and direct mail workflow support, and uses the Ricoh TotalFlow Print Server R600A, which provides native support for PDF, PDF/VT and AFP together with JDF and advanced colour management support.
On its Hunkeler stand, Ricoh is also showing its Ricoh Pro C9100, of which it has had more than 500 European sales in the last two years.
It already has seven VC60000 installations planned this year, two of which will be going into London-based MBA Group over the next couple of months, giving the group the highest global VC60000 output.
Ricoh will be exhibiting at next month’s PrintWeekLive! and will be using the show to give its new Ricoh Pro C5200s series its first UK outing. It was launched two weeks ago at Sign & Print in Stockholm, Sweden.
