Ok, our old DesignJet 1050c printer has finally reached the end (after a
temperamental last year or two), so we're looking at replacing this.
Anyone have any thoughts on what a decent large format printer is these
days?
We're certainly not a large volume printer, I'd say we print between 100
and 200 posters a year, and I'd say at least 95% of what we're printing
is posters for conferences that our faculty and grad students are
attending. These posters tend to be largely text based, with some line
or bar graphs on them. Sometimes they have some photos (and when they
do, we need a fairly decent reproduction of those). We've had enough
requests for something a little wider than 36" such that we'd like to
get at least a 42" printer (and quite frankly, anything wider than that
is probably out of our budget).
We do know about the services offered by the library for printing these,
but we're still interested in keeping this in house (and the library
looks like they can only do up to 36", which while for most things is
ok, it's still something we'd like to be able to go above
periodically). Our last printer lasted us somewhere between 6 and 10
years (long enough that we honestly can't remember exactly when it was
purchased), so over time I think we do enough printing to justify having
it in-house. (And of course, over the years it's something that our
users have gotten used to having available.)
At this point, I've been kind of leaning towards the 44 inch models of
either the HP T770 or T1200 printers, but I'm wondering if anyone has
any thoughts on either these models, or other models that I should
consider. I'd say the upper limit of what we're really looking to pay
would be about $10k. Our secretarial staff does most of the printing
(and changing paper, ink, etc), so something that's reasonably easy to
work with is a plus too (the old 1050c that we had was fine, so as long
as it wasn't worse than something like that).
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Gary
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