Architosh Staff ([email protected])

5 Sep 00

MacCAD News: Five new HP-Plotters

Macintosh-based architects and other CAD professionals will be delighted with Hewlett-Packard's new series of high-performance color ink-jet plotters announced last week at Seybold. All of the plotters offer incredible speed increases and very aggressive price points.

New HP-DesignJets

From their highlights page, "HP has introduced a portfolio of HP DesignJet large-format printing systems designed to give customers impressive printing speeds and excellent image quality."

The next generation of HP DesignJets starts with a new high-end model series, the 5000/5000ps. The fastest of all HP DesignJets the HP-5000 and HP-5000ps comes in both 60" and 42" models. The 5000 series is aimed at print shops and graphic design firms doing very large photographic quality art work (posters) for trade shows, presentations, museum archiving, etc.

The HP DesignJet 800/800ps series and the 500/500ps series are also for graphics professionals, advertising agencies, mapping (GIS) and CAD professionals, offering outstanding color accuracy and faster print speeds then the HP-DesignJet 700 series and 400 series which they replaced, respectively.

Both the 800 series and 500 series come in 24" and 42" models. The 800ps/500ps are the Postscript versions for Windows or Macintosh professionals needing Postscript application printing. These are also the versions most Macintosh CAD professionals would want to purchase, to avoid third party HP-GL generic drivers. The non-Postscript versions don't have native Macintosh drivers but HP apparently makes a generic HP-GL driver for the Macintosh for compatible but no equivalent Postscript printing.

For more info see HP's DesignJet site.