The church office staff has been hard at work behind the scenes on a piece of “infrastructure” that is critical for our ministry: the church printer/copier!  Did you know that the church office is frequently printing 100,000+ pages per year?

In the fall of 2019, St. John’s leadership decided to lease a RISO high-speed duplicator. Last fall we realized we would make our last lease payment in December (more than $1,000 a month). Jennifer Martinez (our church administrative assistant) contacted the company and asked for a new “service only” contract. 

Their answer: “We’re sorry. We won’t be able to continue servicing your machine. We thought we had a new option from South Bend lined up … no luck. They provide service for RISO duplicators but not THIS duplicator! It has reached its “end of life” according to manufacturer’s recommendations.”

Pastor Albers and Jennifer met over the winter with several print technology companies that have presented them with quotes for multi-use machines, sometimes referred to as “multifunction” or “all-in-one” printers.  These machines will copy, print, and scan anything we need. 

In the end, we (along with our Board of Trustees) agreed that a “hometown” company was the best option, so we contracted with Kemp’s Office City to supplement our printing needs until our RISO finally exhausts its ink and supplies. The lease and service contract for the new Konica Minolta multifunction printer is only $160 per month (compare to about $1,100 for the RISO).  We will be continually assessing our printing speed capabilities and making sure that our new machine is meeting our needs.  We may move this new printer to the school office in the future and upgrade to a larger machine with higher printing speeds, so stay tuned.

The good news is that our RISO high-speed duplicator is still working and still churning out bulletins and newsletters! We are currently using up our inventory of RISO-specific supplies and waiting for the day when we receive an error message that we cannot clear ourselves. (The closest service tech is in Lafayette or Carmel!) When that time comes, we will be able to smoothly transition to printing only on the Konica Minolta printer so that we can continue to print bulletins and needed items.