Infotec/Ricoh: here not to help

Friday, February 5th, 2010

Bye bye Infotec, at least in the UK.  The massive photocopier company has found it prudent to merge into the company that actually manufactures its copiers and multi-function devices – Ricoh.

If you search the web for drivers to use a networked copier as a printer then eventually you will find the page that summarises the results of the Infotec/Ricoh merger – a handy resource if you are looking at a room full of Infotec devices and you need (as I did) to update a machine’s printer driver. I like web pages like this: no flimflam, very concise and neatly divided up by topic.

My problem was remarkably simple: looking at an Infotec IS 2430 multifunction machine I couldn’t immediately translate the Infotec model number to a Ricoh one. Reading the tone of that terse and useful page, and realising there was a phone number right by the “downloads” URL, I figured that a call might help me to find the model number conversion table more quickly than a lot of Googling about. I often find that companies in mid or recent merger tend to leave websites not updated, so of course it’s sensible of the new improved Ricoh to include the phone number.

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