Content area
Full Text
special report
cadence lab
Inkjet plotters have been the mainstay of the industry for years but have lagged behind fast laser plotters in paper handling. That has changed with HPs Design Jet 1055CM with multi-roll feeder and Xerox Engineering Systems' X2-TECH. Both are multiple-roll color inkjet plotters that are fast and capable of switching sizes or types of media on the fly.
For running many copies of plan sets under the tight deadline most of you typically face, high-speed multi-- roll laser plotters, such as those from Kip, Oce, and Xerox, can't be beat. But laser plotters don't offer the color capabilities of inkjets, and until recently, no inkjet plotter supported multiple rolls, forcing you to compromise on one media type and size for all jobs or to manually switch media between different jobs. Now you have other options, thanks to the inkjets from Hewlett-Packard and Xerox Engineering Systems, that offer the best of both these worlds and work well for both monochrome line drawings and full-color renderings or photographs.
Testing
Our plotter testing consists of five AutoCAD drawings that range from simple architectural line drawings to one large 30MB color aerial photo. For both plotters, I used the vendor-supplied Windows system driver running AutoCAD 2002 on a 1.6GHz Dell Precision 330 workstation under Windows 2000. The test drawings can be found on our Web site at www.cadenceweb.com/benchmarks/ under the Plotting heading. The timing results from several of these drawings are shown in Table 1. Because many users may find HP's draft mode of insufficient quality and because XES' quality for line drawings is the same in all modes, I list draft and normal times for the Willhome drawing plotted on the HP, while just listing the "fast" mode times for the same drawing printed on the XES unit. Both printers exhibit significant quality differences in images produced at each speed.
Conclusion
HP's DesignJet 1055CM Plus with the multi-roll feeder is the best choice for offices with moderate plot volumes. In most of our tests it is about as fast as the X2-TECH, offers three rolls instead of two, offers better image quality in most modes, is significantly less expensive, and the feeder can be retrofitted to older DesignJet 1000-series plotters. In comparison with the...