Which Press Is The Smarter Five-Year Investment?

A production press contract typically runs 36 to 60 months. Sign one now and you're not deciding what's right for this quarter — you're deciding what's right for the early 2030s. For most of the last sixty years, that was an easy bet: buy a Xerox production press, and you were buying Fujifilm engineering underneath it. Not anymore.

Until 2019, Xerox and Fujifilm were effectively one operation behind the scenes. Fuji Xerox had been a joint venture since 1962 — one engine, one factory floor, sold under two badges. Then Xerox sold its stake back to Fujifilm for $2.3 billion and walked away. Fujifilm kept the engineers and kept building. It sells production presses under its own name now: Revoria.

Xerox didn't stop selling production presses. It stopped building its newest ones. In 2025, it signed a deal to source its next high-speed press from Kyocera — a rebadged competitor's machine, sold under the Xerox name as the IJP900.

And if your shop isn't a large account, the relationship you'd be signing up for is changing too. In February 2026, Xerox moved small and medium business customers off direct sales entirely — handed to channel partners and inside sales teams, while its own sales staff focus on enterprise and corporate accounts. Thomas Valjak, who now leads Xerox's Western Europe Channels and Partners team, said it plainly: "Our partners bring additional capabilities that complement Xerox's strengths." Translated: if you're not a big account, you now deal with whoever picked up the relationship, not Xerox itself.

Sources: Xerox Newsroom, FUJIFILM Business Innovation, Red Dot Design Award 2026.

It's Not About The Model Number

None of this means your Xerox press is about to stop working. Plenty of shops are running one right now, doing exactly what it was bought to do. The real question isn't "is my machine broken" — it's "when something needs fixing or improving, who's actually responsible for making that happen." A firmware update. A colour issue. A worn part. Is that the company that designed the machine — or a company that licenses someone else's design and passes the problem upstream? And when you pick up the phone, are you still talking to Xerox, or to whichever partner inherited your account in the restructuring?

That's the shift underneath the loyalty a lot of small shops still feel toward Xerox. The cost control is real — we're not going to pretend otherwise. But a competitive price today doesn't tell you who's still improving what's inside the machine, or who actually answers when you call in year three.

Where The Investment Is Actually Going

Worth watching, not panicking about: Xerox's own annual report admits supply chain problems — including chip shortages — as a real risk to keeping customers supplied. It lost $1.34 billion in 2024 and $1.03 billion in 2025. It's carrying a heavy debt load relative to its size, and it's cut roughly 1,255 jobs worldwide in the first half of 2026 alone — more than three times the cuts over the same period last year. None of that is broken out by country, so we can't tell you exactly what it means for your local Xerox branch. What it does mean is a few questions worth answering before you sign again — because if you're running a small shop, you probably don't have a second press to fall back on if any of this touches you directly:

• If a client asks for a job this machine can't run in three years, can you say yes — or does that work go to a competitor down the road?
• If it breaks on a Tuesday, how many days of zero output can your business survive waiting on a company that's just cut 1,255 jobs worldwide to get someone out to you?
• If the part you need is stuck somewhere in a stretched supply chain, that's not an abstract risk — it's your only press sitting idle and the job walking out the door. What does a week of that cost you?
• Which press keeps its resale value better when you come to upgrade in three to five years: one from a manufacturer cutting costs, or one from a manufacturer still investing in what's next?

While Xerox Cuts, Fujifilm Builds

Fujifilm isn't just avoiding Xerox's problems — it's building from a position of strength. Fujifilm Holdings made more money in the year to March 2026 than in any year before it, net income up 6%, backed by a company worth more than $28 billion. That strength shows up in the product: December 2025 brought the Revoria Press PC2120, a new flagship six-colour engine with AI-driven automation and a newly developed green toner, rolling out region by region through 2026. The PC2120, alongside the EC2100 and SC285 series, picked up a Red Dot Design Award in 2026 — independent recognition of a genuinely current machine, not a badge-engineered stopgap. That's what you'd actually be buying into: not just a press, but a manufacturer with the money and the momentum to keep improving it.

Who's Actually Building The Machine You're Being Quoted?

Xerox stopped manufacturing its own top-end presses in June 2024, when it halted production of the iGen5 and Nuvera — the last platforms it built end to end. Its six-colour flagship, Iridesse, has picked up feature updates since it launched in 2018, but it's never been replaced with a successor model — there's no "Iridesse II" the way Fujifilm went from the PC1120 to the PC2120 — and it's still built and supplied by Fujifilm Business Innovation under a multi-year contract. Its newest high-speed inkjet press, the IJP900, is a rebadged Kyocera machine. And the press most likely to be quoted against a Revoria for a shop your size — the Xerox Proficio PX300 — isn't a Xerox design at all.

On paper, the PX300 and the Fujifilm Revoria SC285S are identical, because the PX300 is the SC285S under a different badge:

• Same 2,400 × 2,400 dpi LED printhead.
• Same Super EA-Eco toner.
• Same 85 ppm top speed, at the same 52 to 400 gsm media range.
• Same fifth colour station for gold, silver, clear, pink and white effects.

So the spec sheet was never going to settle this one. If two machines really are the same machine, the decision comes down to who built it, who's still developing it, and who you're actually dealing with for the next five years.

That's different from Fujifilm's own range, where the machines genuinely aren't the same. A six-colour flagship built for a shop chasing premium specialty work is a different machine, at a different price and speed, from a lighter mid-production press built for the job mix most small shops actually run. The identical-twin problem above is specific to the PX300/SC285S comparison — it's not true of Fujifilm's range as a whole, which is exactly why the right recommendation depends on what you're actually printing:

What We Specify Now

When a business asks us what to put in next, we specify Fujifilm. At the top of the range, the Revoria Press PC2120 runs at 120 ppm (A4 landscape) on a six-colour engine — CMYK plus dual specialty stations for metallics, fluorescents, white and clear, all in a single pass, at 2,400 × 2,400 dpi from Fujifilm's VCSEL printhead. For a shop your size, the Revoria Press SC285S runs at 85 ppm on mixed media from 52 to 400 gsm, coated and uncoated, with Fujifilm's 5uperColour fifth station — gold, silver, clear, pink and white toner, run at production speed rather than as a separate finishing pass. Both take long-sheet media up to 1,300mm.

"The special colour capabilities have allowed us to offer products no one else can match." — Cactus Graphics

Real Shops Running Fujifilm

Cactus Graphics run a Revoria PC1120 for exactly that reason — gold, silver, white and neon toner, in line, at production speed. It's how they built a product range their local competitors can't quote against.

Ageing equipment was costing Redan Print in colour drift and unplanned downtime, so they replaced their production line with a Revoria SC180. Production speed went up, the backlog cleared, and reliability stopped being a daily conversation.

When Atlantis Print opened a new site in Moorgate, they specified a Revoria SC180 for banner printing up to 660mm from day one — a capability their older machines elsewhere in the group still can't offer.

The Questions Xerox's Own Strategy Raises

Before you sign the next 36 to 60 months away, it's worth checking a few things that a monthly payment figure won't tell you:

• Reliability: the Proficio PX300 has no track record of its own — it only exists because Xerox put its badge on an already-established Fujifilm machine. Ask how long Xerox has actually been selling it, versus how long the underlying engine has been running jobs under the Fujifilm name.
• RIP and workflow software: Fujifilm's version of this press offers a genuine choice of print server — its own Revoria Flow, or Fiery. The Xerox-badged version of the same machine ships with Fiery only.
• Colour profiling: Fujifilm built Revoria Flow specifically to optimise this engine's colour and specialty toner output. Run the Xerox-badged version through Fiery alone, and you're managing colour through a general-purpose front end, not the one built for this machine.
• Operator training: Fujifilm's Aspire programme trains the person actually running the press — step-by-step guidance for applying specialty colour directly at the print server. Xerox's equivalent, the Genesis Initiative, is designer training only. If you're the one running the machine, only one of these was built for you.
• Local support: after February's restructuring, small accounts deal with a channel partner or inside sales for the account relationship itself, not Xerox direct. Worth asking outright whether that also extends to who's dispatched when the machine actually breaks — and whether that's changed in the last twelve months.

The Clock Is Already Running

Most production press contracts run three to five years, which means anyone who signed in 2021 or 2022 is already at, or close to, a renewal decision. That timing lines up with everything above: Xerox's restructuring only took effect in February 2026, its worst two years of losses just landed in its own accounts, and the Proficio rebadge only exists because Xerox needed something to sell once its own platforms stopped. If your renewal is coming up this year or next, you're not choosing between two settled companies — you're choosing in the middle of the change.

Talk To The Team Before You Renew

Call us on 0207 209 5602, email j.lyons@colyer.co.uk, or come and see us in Woking — tell us what you print and we'll help you choose.

Sources

Xerox: Xerox Newsroom (Kyocera supply agreement, July 2025; global print sales restructuring, 16 February 2026; iGen5/Nuvera production statement and Iridesse/Versant/PrimeLink supply agreement); Xerox Holdings SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, quarterly results); Xerox.com product and specification pages (Proficio PX300, Genesis Initiative).

Fujifilm: FUJIFILM Holdings Corporation financial results announcements; FUJIFILM Business Innovation product announcements (Revoria Press PC2120, Aspire programme); Fujifilm product specification pages (Revoria Press SC285S/SC285).

Independent and trade press: printinthechannel.co.uk; Red Dot Design Award; Fiery.com digital front end compatibility listings; further coverage via PrintWeek, PIWorld, WideFormatOnline and BusinessWire.