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De : David Hilpipre Envoyé : vendredi 16 juin 2006 11:04 À : 'Dawes, Peter' Objet : RE: [MI-L] A0 plotter and RIP questions Hello,
I did a study not a very long time ago. I compared quite a
lot of A0 plotter (I did it in France). We mainly print aerial photo, some CAD
maps occasionnaly, as well as posters (for ourselves when we participate to show
or exhibition,these sorts of "gathering"). We were looking for something
reasonnable in terms of budget, maintenance, ease of use. None of the operators
using it are "experts" in the proper meaning of the word so calibrating the
printer every morning before we could operate it was out of question. We are not
very demanding in term of photorealism neither (we don't print advertising
posters, only aerial photographies !)
I got an interest in : Epson, Xerox ,
Océ, Encad, ColorSpan, Canon, Agfa , Mutoh et HP. The first list came from
http://www.sgia.org/ and the first short
list came after eliminating the "over the budget" ones...not many left then.
(but it wasn't only a question of budget, it was essentially a question of
adequacy with our needs : no need for 104 inches wide printers, no need of 16
different colors neither,etc...).
Most of the informations on printers came from resellers
themselves and some FLAAR reports. http://www.flaar.org/
When I discovered that most of the wide printers are
equipped with HP or Epson printheads (Agfa or Xerox for example), the final
shortlist was even easier.
The short list
was then made of HP, Epson, Océ. We went for HP800 despite the fact that Epson
used a 720dpi printhead (600 dpi for HP) an a very good software to drive it
(apparently the best for photorealism as far as I know). It's just that
there are more resellers of HP near here and we fell more confident with that
brand. One of our client bought a Epson 9600 a couple of months
before (with a RIP on a Mac server) and was experiencing a lot of trouble
with Mapinfo (the patterns were so "tight" once printed that they all
looked the same), As for OCE, I made a test with a TCS400 and the picture
quality was a bit...poor.
the negative points for that HP800 (same for Epson I would
suspect, but maybe not for OCE) : we have 160Mo RAM and a 6Go HDD. Despite
this, we can't print a batch of 15 A0 during the night. An error will occur
after the first one. If we want to do this, we definitely need a third party RIP
(the mini RIP inside the HP can do a lot of things but...not a batch
printing)
We had to call for maintenance after we printed approx 750
A0. A thick coat of dried ink on the main axel and some gears had to be cleaned
away. After that, everything was fine again.
Hope this can help
David HILPIPRE
De :
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] De la part de Dawes,
Peter
Envoyé : jeudi 15 juin 2006 23:56 À : [email protected] Objet : [MI-L] A0 plotter and RIP questions Dear
All, I am looking at buying an A0 plotter
and RIP software to run with MapInfo Pro. I have had some experience with a
couple of brands but am keen to get some additional input.
Does anyone have any
suggestions/advice as to what works well? Thanks in
advance, Peter
Dawes Senior
Sergeant Geospatial Information
Project APEC 2007 NSW Police Security
Command Tel:(02)8236
2655
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