Horrible Sharp photocopiers

I don’t often rant on my blog, but I have just about had enough with our school’s 2 Sharp photocopiers. In the last month, these machines have jammed and had more service faults than any other copier I’ve worked with in my whole life. If not the duplex unit giving issues, it is the rollers gone flat in said unit, or the automated document feeder causing skew copies, or lines in the scan and so on. The models we have are the MX-450U and the AR-351. Their constant downtime has caused us plenty of grief, and I’m tired of people ranting at us because they have broken down.

The copy/print quality of these machines are not too bad, but that is about their only saving grace. Their web interfaces are very spartan and not useful beyond the basics. The copier itself also doesn’t scan to email or network as standard, which is something I found astounding. These are fairly recent machines, and the fact that you need a license and an add in board for these simple functions is daylight robbery.

My next gripe is that the drivers for these machines haven’t been updated in a long time, so getting them to work with printer deployment in Windows 7 has been challenging because the driver we have isn’t digitally signed by Microsoft. I’ve spent too much time fiddling with these things, trying to track down something more recent and useful.

Luckily our school is looking to get out of our contracts with Sharp, and to get some quality Ricoh copiers. I look forward to that day, to work with a product I know and like. The sooner the better I feel. This is one more step on our modernisation path for the school.