Ricoh SP W2470 Pricing Blunder?

Could the SP W2470 be the biggest pricing blunder by Ricoh Co. in Japan?

A few months ago, I thought the pricing for their new Ricoh W2400 was out of whack (and I still think so), and now the SP W2470 comes along with an MSRP $11,545 and you HAVE to buy a dual roll feeder for the unit! That's right no single roll feeder is available! This is a MAJOR fault! Ricoh should have offered both a single and a dual and let the customer decide what they need, NOT THE MANUFACTURER!

MSRP with Dual Roll Feeder and the base machine is $15,204, I thought they should have come in around $12K tops, and they would be able to capture more TDV and increase placements while increasing consumable revenues. My thoughts is that many of the existing Ricoh 240W customers would add this unit as a extra and or a backup unit. However, not at this price!

Which leads me to this, I could offer my customer a Ricoh W2400 with copy and print with a single roll feeder for a list of $16,593. There's a difference here of $1,389. Now you tell me, what would the customer rather have just a printer that would lease for $296 (60 month rate factor) per month or a copier and printer for $323.56 per month? Right, for $27.56 I'll steer them to the copier printer all of the time! It amounts to less than a DOLLAR a day to have the copy feature! Oh, and by the way! Where is the form feed key on the Ricoh W2400???? If you send a wrong paper size to the printer you can not force feed the job, you must delete the entire print job.

Last year I sold 19 Ricoh 240W units, while only two had dual roll feeders attached. For me almost 95% of my units had a single roll feeder. Give the customers what they want!

Now on the other hand it would be nice to have the Ricoh SP W2470 in a 6ppm configuration, clients could justify the cost to add a standalone 6ppm system in addition to their existing machines.

On another note seems to me that there is still another segment of the market that is untapped. A market where there are 3 to 8 employees and all they need to do is print. They are out sourcing some 40 - 80 prints a month and can't afford payments of $296 and they are buying ink plotters whether HP or Canon. It would be nice to capture these customer also.

My general opinion is that Ricoh Wide Format is resting on their laurels with the Ricoh SP W2400. Their concern was to not capture more TDV, but to hold pricing similar to the outdated technology of the their competitors. And, while I'm on the subject, most of my customers could not give three hoots about the Document Server, Web Image Monitor, and Desktop Binder Lite. Thus with the launch of the Ricoh SP W2470 they have priced these units so they will not sell!

How many will I sell this year, one, yeah one might be right.