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From: rdp@teddy.UUCP (Richard D. Pierce)
Newsgroups: net.graphics
Subject: Re: Seen any nice small plotters lately?
Message-ID: <3127@teddy.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 8-Sep-86 11:04:14 EDT
Article-I.D.: teddy.3127
Posted: Mon Sep  8 11:04:14 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 8-Sep-86 20:27:32 EDT
References: <289@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP>
Reply-To: rdp@teddy.UUCP (Richard D. Pierce)
Organization: GenRad, Inc., Concord, Mass.
Lines: 32

In article <289@sdchema.sdchem.UUCP> sd@sdchem.UUCP (Steve Dempsey) writes:
>We are in the market for a new small plotter.  Our requirements are:
>
>1. 11" x 17" flatbed with sheet feeder, or 11" wide drum.
>2. Self capping pens (minimum of 4).
>3. RS232 interface.
>
>Send me your experiences, both good and bad, and I'll summarize for the net.
>Thanks in advance.

(I know he meant mail, but I am sort of an expert here, so I thought my
reply would be of general interest.)

I used to work for Applicon, and was their main plotter guru there. I had the
opportunity to extensively evaluate a wide variety of plotters, including
those from HP, Calcomp, Huoston Instruments, and so forth. The clear winner
is HP. The HP 7550 does everything you need, has a very simple yet extremely
powerful interface language (HP-GL), is exteremely reliable, has the best
manufacturers support, the best documentation, generated the best looking
plots of the like, and so on.

The price may or may not be as good as the others, but having spent many
hundreds of hours writing software for them all, and having to jury rig
repairs on many of them to get them to work, the extra price for the HP
was far and away worth it.

By the way, the worst line of plotters I encountered was that from Calcomp.
Crude interface languages, poor reliability, miserable documentation, what
support from the manufacturer I could find was either ill-informed or down-
right nasty. I can never recommend the use of Calcomp products to anyone.

Dick Pierce