Indesign CS3 printing alignment issues with Konica Bizhub

Question

Hi,
I am designing documents in ID CS3 to print inhouse on our Konica Minolta BizHub 350 through a Fiery. I will set up a document with at least .375 inch border all the way around. I'll print it, sometimes the documents are duplex, and it's all good. A month later I will go to print this document again, same print set up options and everything is shifting to one side, sometimes as much as .5 inch. Our printer technicians have been out here and found that we did not have the appropriate Fiery driver. So we downloaded and installed that and everything seemed to be fine until today, I go to print a document that had previously been set up and everything is shifting to the side. I went in and selected the paper size rather than let it be defined by driver and it helped a little but it's still off. Same thing happens on business cards. I'll set up the business card template in InDesign, futz with it to make sure it's printing within the card size (I can't tell you how many sheets of business card paper I've had to toss trying to work this out) and works great. Next time I go to print the cards, everything is shifted up by a quarter of an inch.
This makes no sense to me. Am I doing something wrong in InDesign? Has anyone else had this problem? I just can't spend hours realigning every document that I've already created every time I have to print them. Please help.
Mina

Answer 1

You may see about getting upgraded to the Creo print management software for the BizHub over the Fiery. Despite it having its quirks it does pretty well.
We have had great luck with our BizHub though it only runs 6 hours per day. Only have to have service for PM kits. I don't know about those who require so much more service on theirs, perhaps they aren't built for 24/7 continuous operation. Ours certainly has no trouble being ran through the little one shift routine we put it through. Again, we don't really push the thing, just a hair under a quarter million impressions a year with a variety of odd stocks. For a specialty machine that does our short runs and one offs it is a really nice machine, though not something I'd just hit "print 1000" without reviewing an initial proof.
If you need to have it serviced that frequently and are getting inconsistent results that you speak of I think you are running the machine incorrectly. The gentleman that runs our was previously running a hand crank letter press for the last twenty years. It and a couple black and white production printers are his only exposure to computers at all. You should have someone educate you on how to properly run the machine if you are continually running into these problems, or get a $300 PC and a copy of Adobe Reader to do the printing for you like we do.