Jeff McRitchie

Martin Yale Intimus 2051 SmartFold Review

With its automatic setup function, high speed of operation and attractive price point, the Martin Yale Intimus 2051 is a folding machine worth considering for high-volume mail rooms and printing shops. We recently put the Martin Yale Intimus 2051 through its paces. This article will give you the machine's strengths and weaknesses as we see them:

Strengths:

1. First of all, for what it offers, the price of the Intimus 2051is astounding. It is somewhere around $500 less than most other machines on the market that offer similar feature sets. That's something that anyone can appreciate.
2. The centerpiece of the Intimus 2051's many features is its automatic setup function. It's so easy to use, you'll wonder why you ever considered buying a manual machine. With the Intimus 2051, you don't need to loosen any screws or move any folding plates around by hand. All you need to do to get another folding pattern from the Intimus 2051 is to push a button, and the folding plates move automatically into the correct position.
3. The Intimus 2051's on-board control panel allows you to store up to ten custom jobs in its memory. For instance, if you want to do a standard fold on a non-standard size sheet, and you find that you need to do this on a regular basis, you can store those settings so they are push-button easy to do every time.
4. The Intimus 2051 can easily handle just about any paper size and thickness. We were really impressed at how easily this machine dealt with heavy duty paper stocks. The Intimus 2051 is rated for 90lb stock, but we pushed that up to 110lb and had no problems at all. We also really appreciated that we could adjust the speed of the 2051 to accommodate glossier paper stocks. We were able to reduce slipping and paper jams by reducing the speed when folding hard to fold paper stocks.
5. The 2051 can give you a compressive array of folds, including letter, half, z, baronial, double parallel, gate, and church folds. You can even set up the 2051 to perform the custom folds of your choosing.
6. We really liked the 2051's large feed tray capacity. This is a real time saver on large jobs, as you won't have to stop the process and reload the machine as often. We also appreciated the pause function which allowed us to do our packaging without getting too far behind.
7. Also impressive is that the Intimus 2051 is USB-ready. If there are any software upgrades, you can install them with ease. Also, if there are any problems with the machine, it is possible to hook it up to a computer for online diagnosis by a technician.
8. The Intimus 2051 is a fast machine, working at an astounding fifteen thousand sheets per hour. For glossy or heavy stocks, you can slow it down to around three thousand per hour.

Weaknesses:

1. The Intimus 2051 is not a small machine by any means. Weighing in at a little more than 100lbs, and with a footprint of two by four feet or so, you will probably want to make sure that the 2051 has its own dedicated space on your counter top, as moving it around is going to be a bit of a chore. You will also need to make sure that you have a crew prepared when the machine arrives since it will be strapped to a pallet.
2. In our testing we found that the Intimus 2051 took some time to finalize the correct fold plate positioning. The plates move fairly quickly, but then the setup process slows down just a little. In all, it took as much as 40 seconds or so to complete the process.
3. The Intimus 2051 does not have scoring or perforating abilities. Many other high end paper folders allow you to add scoring or perforating wheels to the machine. Unfortunately, that ability is not included on this machine.

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