Our large format (A3/ 11x17) 7550a pen plotters have been dying (they had
been unbelieveably
reliable, shame that HP doesn't make these any more), and I've looked for a
good
replacement. Laser printers work fine, but many of my users want color, and
large format color laser printers are a bit too pricey at this point.
Our not so good experience: We have been
using the Epson 1520a (which is very cheap currently...about $499 (original
$1500)
from the PC/Mac
suppliers, plus about $200 for a network card) on one of out NMR's
and while the output is very nice, it has not turned out to be a good high
usage printer.
Besides its ocassional desire to print garbage,
on a regular basis it misfeeds (we use high quality paper too!), and it
behaviour is not reasonable:
it is a paper eater (one of the frustrating varieties):
you have to press pause button for it to continue and spit out a blank
sheet, and then again
and again until it is happy with the number of buttons presses and finally
prints the spectra.
The paper is on a "manual feed" type tray (there is no other). If the
print heads go out,
the printer must be repaired (or tossed (from a very high place :-)):-).
No way I was going to buy another Epson for to replace the plotter going
out on our second NMR.
Recently, without much fanfare (that I've seen anyway), HP came out with a
"professional"
series inkjet: HP 2500CM. It has paper trays (which can be set to various
sizes including A3),
Postscript level 3, and "Jetdirect" networking card, seperate cart for each
color (4) and 4 removable
heads, all for around $1500. It seems fairly rugged, and paper handling is
fairly good.
It was advertised for PC's (Mac-compatability or in other words, an
appletalk upgrade,
will come end of July), but since it has TCP-IP and it is a postscipt
color printer, the NMR UNIX boxes have no problem talking to it. Set up
was fairly straightforward,
although I did get some worrisome error messages when aligning print heads,
I tried a few
times & reseated the heads and it was happy. I am using the generic Bruker
color postscipt 600 dpi
drivers which work fine, although I couldn't find a color driver in
XWINPLOT (B&W postscript works).
Thus far, it has worked very nicely.